


The Ocean Keep Our Brave

by YourPalYourBuddy



Category: The Scorpio Races - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, F/M, Gen, Hunger Games-Typical Death/Violence, Slow Burn, Work In Progress, au so take that into account, if you remember finnick's arc there's a character in a similar situation, just a head's up, okay so: probably not gonna be too graphic in re violence but this is a, this is also going to be the slowest of slow burns on account of hey death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-16
Updated: 2018-03-09
Packaged: 2019-03-05 10:51:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 38,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13386264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YourPalYourBuddy/pseuds/YourPalYourBuddy
Summary: Brian shouts at us from his family’s boat several yards away, pointing to the red flag flying high over the lighthouse that says we should come in to shore. My brother and I don’t speak on the way in other than to maneuver away from other boats and the occasional sharp, Capitol-created rock dotting the harbor. I steer us very clear of these; rumor has it they’re poisoned to prevent water escapes on reaping days, and I’ve never wanted to test the theory.It takes an age and a half to sort out the nets once we’ve moved the fish, but I don’t mind. It’s soothing to have something to do with my hands.“Hey,” Brian says from over my shoulder. I feel him sit beside me and I relax, leaning against his side for the space of a heartbeat before righting myself. He nudges me back, reaching for the net. “Ready for today?”“Of course not,” I say back, and he laughs. It’s a tired beaten thing.He says, “When are we ever.”________________A TSR Hunger Games AU. Puck and Sean's POVs.





	1. Part 1: The Tributes

________________________

 

**THE TRIBUTES**

________________________

 

**SEAN**

It is the first day of November and so, today, two children will be called forward to die.

I don’t rouse right away, intent on sleeping this morning away as much as I can. The reaping in District Four takes place around noon, giving everyone unlucky enough to have their names in the pool time to panic and calm themselves and then panic once more. This routine no longer includes me. Now I burrow under my blankets and pretend I do not wear the agony of being chosen like a second skin.

I hear Peg rummaging through the kitchen drawers and wonder why it is she isn’t with her family at home. She has a son a year younger than me, Beech, who is facing the last of his reaping eligibility today.

My electric clock blinks the time at me innocently and I allow myself a shudder. Just one. The second I leave my bed I have to become Sean Kendrick, the district’s youngest champion in twenty years. The reaping means cameras, and if I can’t pull myself together, sponsors will never take my tributes seriously.

In light of this I take my time in the bathroom, showering the nightmare-induced mess out of my hair. There’s nothing I can do about the purple-grey shadows beneath my eyes, so I let them be.

A misstep a year after my Games told me I am to be defenseless, so I leave my hands free of weapons. Foam of some kind in my hair left from my prep team ages ago. A dark black sweater. My token, a pin of the mythical water horses surrounding my district. These things will have to do.

“Peg,” I say, pushing out of my room to the stairs. A pause in the kitchen shuffling tells me she heard. “Go home.”

A drawer scrapes open with unnecessary force, as I expected. I come down the stairs slowly, still surprised to find unrotten wood underfoot even after these seven years. This house still does not seem quite real in my hands. I can’t say if I deserve it.

Peg’s hair, when I come into the kitchen, reminds me fiercely of how I looked when I woke up. I’m reminded of my mother ages ago complaining about the humidity playing with her curls. It is not a day made for laughing, and I am not in the habit of laughter regardless, but I allow myself a little smile.

She’s cooking something on the stove and I want so much not to be curious about what it is. Seven years, and I still feel like the boy from the docks with nothing to eat.

She glares and says, “Leave me be, Sean,” and I don’t push.

I take two plates from the cabinet over the sink and she spoons a mixture of eggs and seaweed and crabmeat onto both. We eat in silence.

____________________________________

 

**PUCK**

Gabe checks his watch and from the way his jaw tightens I know. He doesn’t say anything, but he nods when I raise my eyebrows and I pull up my nets. The added weight of the fish sets the boat rocking uneasily. He helps me haul everything in before I tip us.

There is too much to be said right now and so much of it is centered around the fact that, including this year’s tesserae, my name is in the reaping bowl thirty-six times.

Brian shouts at us from his family’s boat several yards away, pointing to the red flag flying high over the lighthouse that says we should come in to shore. My brother and I don’t speak on the way in other than to maneuver away from other boats and the occasional sharp, Capitol-created rock dotting the harbor. I steer us very clear of these; rumor has it they’re poisoned to prevent water escapes on reaping days, and I’ve never wanted to test the theory.

It takes an age and a half to sort out the nets once we’ve moved the fish, but I don’t mind. It’s soothing to have something to do with my hands.

“Hey,” Brian says from over my shoulder. I feel him sit beside me and I relax, leaning against his side for the space of a heartbeat before righting myself. He nudges me back, reaching for the net. “Ready for today?”

“Of course not,” I say back, and he laughs. It’s a tired beaten thing.

He says, “When are we ever.”

____________

 

Our parents are dead but my mother still helps me pick an outfit nice enough for the reaping. It’s a sick game the Capitol plays on us, aside from the obvious; making us dress pretty for execution is an effective mind game.

Today only two of the Connolly children braves the reaping bowls, so only two of us bathe in lukewarm water and dress in our parents’ mothy clothing. I can’t tell if my dress smells like my mother or like the dresser I pulled it from. Either way, it has a thin layer of dried sea salt crusted into every fold.

I hear Gabe stuff his hands into the pockets of his shorts as he waits in the cramped living room for Finn and me to be ready. The floorboards creak in the middle of the room, and I imagine him pacing anxiously back and forth. I want to yell at him to stop, tell him that he’ll only panic Finn more, but for the seventh time in my life I find I can’t speak.

Finn pokes his head in my room and he looks so swallowed up by our father’s button down shirt that I want nothing more than to risk those rocks in the harbor and sail off somewhere beyond District Four.

But his voice shakes when says, “Gabe has hot chocolate on the stove,” even though it’s still the middle of our warm season and even though we have half a pinch of chocolate powder left, and there is a patch of thin fabric on his shirt where our father would wipe his hands after cleaning lobster smuggled from the catch of the day.

There is too much of us sunk into this District. It is impossible to run, regardless.

When I speak I can’t let my voice sound anything less than steady. “I’ll be right out.”

Gabe hands me a mug, and it is so watered down that I barely taste the chocolate. I can’t say that I would’ve been able to anyway, if the circumstances were different; reaping days don’t do much for my appetite.

We walk the dirt path to the market square with our elbows hooked together, looking for all the world like we’re playing the fishing game taught to us in kindergarten. I stifle an urge to skip maniacally the rest of the way.

The market square smells like fish, and always has and probably always will. The crisp whiteness of the buildings and the green accents of the ribbons strewn across the buildings, combined with the smell and the fact that this is the very place merchants haggle for goods, mix together unpleasantly in my mouth. It’s difficult to separate the lottery system of the reaping from the auctioning of the catch, even though they are fundamentally different; the tributes and the lobster both share the same stage.

There’s already a crowd by the time we show up. We hug without talking about it, and then Gabe hugs us both individually before standing along the edge of the square. Finn is younger than I am, but when I hug him myself I can barely rest my chin on his shoulder.

“Come on,” I say, dragging us to the registration table.

The Peacekeeper working the table smears our fingerprints in something that smells like fish oil and presses them on sheets of paper while another takes a sample of our blood. I used to worry about this more than the reaping when I was younger because of the needle. Having survived six reapings so far, though, I know there are worse things.

Finn flinches like I knew he would when his blood sample is drawn. When it’s over, I kiss his cheek and say, “Good luck.”

We part ways, him going to stand with the other fifteen year olds and me going to very back. I find Brian and we hold hands, not romantically, but because not doing so means a greater risk of falling. He has always been one of the steadiest people I know.

“Alright, Katie-kat?” he whispers. I nod, stiff.

Trumpets from the roof play a fanfare and everyone tenses noticeably. My grip on Brian’s hand must have tightened, too, because he elbows me and I mouth an apology. He bumps into me like he did in the harbor and he takes a deep breath and then I do, too, and we face the stage from the reaping pool for the last time. However today ends, this will be the last time we are in danger of the arena.

Mayor Mooneyham creaks onto the stage holding Sean Kendrick’s arm and a written speech. As always when they appear, there’s some canned applause piped in from somewhere, no doubt to try and persuade us to clap for our youngest victor in recent memory. I am too unsteady for applause. Brian claps his free hand against mine and it will have to be enough.

Mooneyham is older and more wrinkled than the Capitol has air time for, so I am unsurprised that the cameras focus on Sean Kendrick and our little flock of victors. I recognize Dory Maud from the year that the Games were played within a volcano and wonder which of the eight of them will be mentors this year.

There’s more applause, real this time, and I realize I’ve tuned out the mayor’s required speech on the Rebellion against the Capitol. I could recite it in my sleep by this point.

Our district-assigned Capitol liaison, Elizabeth, practically elbows Mooneyham and the other victors out of the way to get to the reaping bowls. Brian laces our fingers together and I let him, squeezing tight.

Elizabeth’s hair is bright, bright red this year. I focus on the unnatural strands poking out from underneath her huge bonnet to distract myself from the fact that someone’s life is going to be cut considerably short thanks to today.

 _Her nails are too long to be practical_ is my last thought before she reaches into the girls’ bowl without any ceremony, and when she calls out my name, I don’t think of anything at all.

____________________________________

 

**SEAN**

It is my year again so I am the one who walks Mooneyham to the stage. He still pats and pinches my cheek like he did the year after I won, as if I were once again thirteen. I smile because I must for the cameras.

Dory Maud rolls her eyes and because I know her too well by now, I know this is because she is too warm standing here even in our patch of shade. The children below us in the square are the ones truly suffering. But because I know her by now, am too aware of her nightmares thanks to her time as my mentor, I know this is because she remembers too well. Not for the first time I wish she were allowed to be exempt from today’s proceedings. As my mentor partner, though, and without being on death’s door, there was as much chance of the district getting snow.

Mayor Mooneyham trembles his way through his speech and introduces us. From this vantage it is so clear to see the cameras point to us. I smile automatically now, as do my fellow victors. So much of winning over sponsors begins on this stage right now.

There is not much time to scan the crowd and wonder which of them will not have the odds in their favor when Elizabeth calls out, “Kate Connolly.”

I frown for half a second before pasting on another smile. I know that name.

The Connolly children are one of the district’s sadder stories. I remember rooting through rotting fish behind the merchant’s shop and feeling sorry for them. Having lost both parents to the Capitol’s sea horse mutts, the kind that bite you open and drag you beneath the water, the Connollys have been barely keeping themselves afloat in recent years.

Kate extricates herself from Brian Carroll and approaches the stage, and to her credit she doesn’t stumble. She’s not particularly big, but she isn’t scrawny either; years of fishing have given her some muscle and a squint that they’ll have to wary of when prepping her for the parade. She glances at Dory Maud and me and I wonder what she’s thinking, if we measure up. I’ll need her to trust us if she’s to make it out of this alive.

“Does anyone wish to volunteer?” Elizabeth asks the crowd, but only the ocean answers. Kate squeezes her eyes shut for half a second before raising her chin and crossing her arms.

She’s acting. I make a note of how her left leg shakes and resolve to bring it up in training.

“No one?”

I find the other Connollys in the crowd, calculating whether they would have if they could. The older of the two, Gabe, looks as if he’s fighting off a headache of the mind-splitting kind. He could not have volunteered this year regardless; he is a little older than I am. Finn, the younger, stands only with the aid of Jonathan Carroll.

“Very well,” Elizabeth says briskly. She crosses to the boys’ bowl and Kate’s hands fist so tightly I see blood beading up from the skin. Elizabeth reads, “Jonathan Carroll.”

_“No!”_

Everyone turns to the lone voice dissenting and I hope so much that Brian Carroll is volunteering, not rebelling, because there is no outcome today that has the odds in his favor. There are too many guns and not a one of them in his hands.

But then Elizabeth shushes him, saying, “We have a procedure, young man, even if this is a district,” and I know that he will survive today. He is, at the very least, no longer in immediate danger of a bullet.

Brian stays silent while Peacekeepers pull his brother to the stage, stays silent while Elizabeth introduces Jonathan. I see even from here that Jonathan is not quite right in the head, and so does everyone else; there is so much whispering that for a moment it sounds like a pit of snakes.

The cruelty of the Games hits me underneath my ribs, the same place it always does. Dory Maud rubs my back between my shoulderblades and I know she’s feeling the same thing.

“Any volunteers?” Elizabeth says, her voice an annoying singsong. Everyone once again turns to Brian Carroll and he squares his shoulders under the weight of the district’s gaze.

“I volunteer as tribute,” he says, his voice strong. I think of his square shoulders and her raised chin and I think maybe, just maybe, this year could be it.

Elizabeth beckons him forward impatiently and he embraces his brother at the top of the steps, whispering furiously. They are pulled apart by Peacekeepers after a minute has passed, and Brian turns his back to the cameras to wipe his eyes.

Elizabeth calls upon Kate and Brian to affirm their status and they do. I mouth the words with them: “by my blood.”

We have a saying with the Games that I’ve never heard another district repeat. I’m not sure where it comes from, but it calls to mind the mythology living in the seas when the sea horse mutts were kinder. It means everything. Here, at the reaping, it means good luck, but mostly it means goodbye.

The whole square echoes with the sea as our people say, “The ocean keep our brave.”

____________________________________

 

**PUCK**

I have a list and not much time to tell them, so when Finn and Gabe come in to say goodbye I sit them down and pace.

“With two of you, there’ll be less food to buy and share — Gabe, please, you can probably keep bartering as you have been, maybe at a slight increase. Sell my things if you must, but no signing up for tesserae, Finn, you name isn’t going into that bowl more than it has to—”

“Puck,” Gabe says, but his voice is so quiet I can ignore him and say what I have to.

“And, the Grattons are good for their word, if you can get Beech to help I know he would. Palsson’s looking for an apprentice at the bakery, Finn, maybe you could—”

“Puck,” Gabe says again, loud enough enough this time that I have to look at him. He has his arms around Finn and the sight of our brother crying is nearly enough to send me crying too. “Don’t cry,” Gabe whispers. He motions me over and we collapse into a tearful heap on the ground. One of them is stroking my hair and I think it’s Finn.

Gabe murmurs, “I won’t let us starve,” and then I cry for real.

Finn reaches into his pocket and says, “I almost forgot.” In his hands, he’s holding a pair of our mother’s earrings. He tips them into my palm.

“How—?”

His reply is thin. “I wanted to get mine pierced, too. To celebrate you aging out.”

They are pearls and they look like the jellyfish that wash up sometimes in the harbor. I pick one up cautiously, as if they’re going to sting me.

We’re allowed a district token in the games. In the past, our tributes have brought necklaces and brooches, pins and little flat disks. Things of value, but typically only due to sentiment. I have a vivid fear of someone cutting my ears off for these.

I put one in my right ear but give him the other. “We’ll match,” I tell him. Gabe holds us close to him a moment longer, and then the Peacekeepers knock on the door and shoo them away.

Their footsteps echo down the hallway and they’re away from me before I realize I never said I loved them. I press my thumb over the post of the earring until I know it’ll bruise and I hope they know without me having said it.

____________

 

Sean Kendrick and Dory Maud chat idly with Elizabeth as we enter the train. I want to yell at them, want to force them to pay attention to us. Brian and I both will die if they don’t give us any help.

The train has dark wood panelling and carpet that’s as clear blue and soft as water. I kick my shoes off immediately after the train door hisses shut, and it’s almost like being in the harbor at home. Brian raises his eyebrows at me and I ignore his red eyes — I’ve never been any help with crying — and mime taking shoes off. He does, and the look of surprise on his face is the first reason I smile since my name was drawn.

I have the strangest sense that this is how I’ll sort the short remainder of my life. Before the reaping and after. I look at Dory Maud and Sean Kendrick and how they take careful sips of what looks like wine at the long dining table and wonder if this is what they’ve done, too. If there’s any other way to carry onward.

Sean Kendrick catches my stare and raises his glass as if toasting me. I don’t know what to make of it, so I glare in response. He narrows his eyes.

Servants dressed in Capitol whites carry plates and plates of food to the table and it takes everything that’s in me not to carry off the platter of lobster and disappear to a bedroom down the hall. As it is, I made do with rearranging the plates so that the platter is in front of me only, and am on my second before Elizabeth scoffs.

“How disgusting,” she says, dabbing her lips with a napkin.

“If I’m to fight to the death,” I say, making a show of wiping my mouth on my arm. “I will do so on a full stomach.”

Sean, Dory Maud, and Brian laugh, although Brian’s is strained and hoarse. Elizabeth purses her lips but doesn’t comment through the rest of dinner.

There are too many dishes. I’ve filled up on lobster before the second course arrives, mostly because they’re delicious and melt in my mouth, but also because I thought having courses at meals were a romanticized thing from the Capitol. There is so much food and I can’t stop picturing the empty cupboard back home.

Elizabeth sends us all off to bed once the servants have cleared the last dish. It’s late, and there’s still so much ground to cover before reaching the Capitol that by now our best option is sleep.

I find a shower in my room and spend half an hour at least just standing underneath the water. It reminds me of a waterfall we’d found ages ago, with our parents, and the memory alone has me crying for too long.

Home will be a distraction. One that might get me killed. I finger my earring and try to lock my siblings away.

____________

 

The train feels a little bit like the boats back home, so I had hoped that drifting off would be as easy. It is not. All I’ve managed so far is to twist my blankets back and forth and nearly strangle myself with the strap of my tank top and try not to imagine in which way I’ll be killed on television. I was unsuccessful.

There’s no breeze in my room aside from the fan, and the fan is so pathetic that it barely stirs my hair. The windows don’t open, which isn’t surprising; I spare a moment to guess how many tributes escaped that way in Games past.

I need to get out of this room. I pull on a large, flowy sweater that falls to my knees before tiptoeing carefully into the hallway.

The hallway lights must adjust automatically to the outside because they’re soft and dewy like the sun at nightfall. I keep a hand pressed to the wall absently, feeling the fuzz of the wallpaper. It’s softer than anything I’ve ever felt back home.

There’s a TV in the train, another bit of luxury that makes my mouth dry in anger, and it illuminates someone sitting across from it. Sean Kendrick, with a notebook propped against his knee. I glance at the screen and he’s watching one of the many recaps of the reaping that will be playing until the parade tomorrow night.

“You’re up late,” he says levelly. He doesn’t look up, so I’m unsure how he heard me.

I say, “As are you,” and when he tilts his head in acknowledgement I sit beside him. “Studying?”

“Yes. We’ll go over it tomorrow in the Training Center, but for tonight I wanted to know their names.”

I’ve never heard anyone say anything like that before. Most years, the only names we know are the two kids selected from our district, their families, the two mentors, and whoever won. Most of the time we try to forget even that, if the victor isn’t from Four.

“Why?”

“They’re human, too,” he says. “Forgetting that makes these Games worse.”

I frown at that for some reason I don’t want to nor think I can voice aloud.

I don’t say anything and he doesn’t either, content, it seems, to let an uncomfortable silence stretch between us. He takes quick notes as the reapings go on and I am struck by how much bigger the tributes from One and Two are, even if we do come from Career districts. All four of them could probably throw me like I weighed nothing. The youngest this year is only thirteen, from District Six. His face sticks out from the others even after Sean turns off the TV.

“Training starts in the morning, Kate,” he says, and his tone can only be described as ‘soft’. I’m puzzling this over until he yawns and I realize he’s only tired. “Best to get some sleep. You don’t know how much you’ll be getting in the arena.”

“Puck,” I say. I stretch and stand, imitating his actions without thinking.

He tilts his head to the side again. It’s a wonder, really, that his neck isn’t permanently messed up. “Puck?”

“Nickname. From my mother.”

Sean says, “Puck,” as if it tastes funny on his tongue and he’s not sure if he likes it. He nods. “I’ll make a note.”

And he does.

____________________________________

 

**SEAN**

In the end, she doesn’t go back to her room. Neither do I.

Dory Maud finds us some time around three in the morning passed out in the TV room, Puck’s head on my chest and my arm around her. The instant Dory Maud flicks on the light we jump apart.

“It’s three,” Dory Maud says to her. “Bed. Now.”

Puck awkwardly wishes us both good night, but Dory Maud stops me with a hand on my chest.

“Sean Kendrick, you know as much as I do—”

She has every right to be telling me this. More than every right, in fact; I’ve endangered her tribute tonight. There’s no set rule against mentor and tribute relationships, but the Gamemakers always make the tribute’s life miserable in the arena. It’s too much to hope that a servant hadn’t walked in while we were sleeping, or that the cameras I know live in this room were defective.

I interrupt her and it’s only because she is my second family that she does not yell over me. “I know how it looks,” I say, and even despite how long I’ve known her she doesn’t let me finish.

“You mean, your arms around her? Her cradled to your stomach? The fact that you’re arguing with me, here and now? Tell me,” she says, dropping to a whisper. I shiver as if she had shouted. “Tell me what the Capitol will think of the fact that already you swallow her with your eyes.”

She scans my face and I look away. I don’t have a response.

“You are the oldest nineteen I’ve ever met,” she says. I hear something of an apology in her voice, but it rests uneasily on my shoulders; everything she’s saying is right. “But getting one of them out will be hard enough without being attached, and you know what I promised your father.”

“I know,” I tell her. “I won’t be.”

____________

 

The next morning we discuss strategy. Dory Maud won her game diverting magma to trap her opponents, and while she answers their questions about manipulating the arena I let her hold my hand tightly. Brian asks something about finding supplies, and she hesitates. She takes a bite of her muffin and loudly tells them to ask me.

Brian and Puck look uncertain and concerned by her apparent dismissal of the question.

“The Cornucopia’s ideal for that,” I say, ignoring the fact that Dory Maud’s nails are now digging just so slightly into my skin. “I’m assuming you know that, though. Your priority the next few days is to decide whether or not you want allies. The Career pack almost always takes over the Cornucopia and is almost always decided before the Games begin.”

“There’s the initial bloodbath to be concerned about too.” Dory Maud lets go of my hand with an apologetic squeeze, and I rub the fingernail marks from my palm. “Depending on your strategy, you’ll either want to stay and fight or pick up the nearest thing and find water, shelter, et cetera.”

“What’s it like,” Puck says, accidentally spewing crumbs over the table. Or, perhaps not so accidentally; I see Elizabeth’s eyes narrow as she brushes crumbs off her bright green coat, and Puck comes close to smiling. “Sorry. What’s the bloodbath like?”

From the careful way she addresses Dory Maud, I infer that they too have had a talk. I say, blunt, “Dying but worse.”

What it’s like. What it’s like is a nightmare that doesn’t end when I opened my eyes. Like the Games condensed into five minutes that decide if you live or die and any second it might change. It still forces itself to be known in my dreams, except worse now that I have names from seven years repeating in my head. I still remember all of them.

Two of the victors standing with us onstage yesterday were my tributes, but that’s only two out of the last fourteen children who’ve made it back alive. And I can add Brian and Puck to the roster, too, if I don’t push past this.

I catch the tail end of Dory Maud’s explanation before the train passes through the tunnels surrounding the Capitol. We’re through in seconds, before Brian can finish his questioning “Wha—?” He catches his breath soon enough, though I understand his shock.

The Capitol is brighter and more showy than the newsreels show, and they rarely capture the noise that so many people in one city can possibly make. I read in some newspaper my last forced visit to the Capitol that Four could fit within the city three and a half times as far as size, but that we are outnumbered four to one. I’ve never found out which figure was pure propaganda.

Given the way the tides are flowing it’s probably best to find out. I make a note to ask whomever I’m assigned to tonight.

We pull in to the Tribute Center and take the elevator to floor four. When we enter the apartment, Puck and Brian both hide anger behind careful masks of interest. I glance at Dory Maud and she gives me a grim smile.

“Now remember, today’s the day you meet your prep team,” Elizabeth says, wiping a finger along the tabletop for dust. She wrinkles her nose. “Do try to be courteous and polite. They are your best defense tonight.”

Elizabeth whisks them both to the prep section of the floor and Dory Maud lets out a huge sigh.

“What do you think of them?” I ask.

“Not hopeless,” she says. She slides her shoes off and tosses them into a corner. “Concerned about Brian, though. His lungs aren’t in good shape, says they hurt when he runs for an extended amount of time.”

That is not ideal, unless Brian can get hands on a distance weapon. In which case it will still not be ideal but will hopefully not get him killed.

“We need good sponsors.” I pretend to be scanning a menu to avoid looking at her. “I have an assignation tonight. I’ll see what I can do.”

Dory Maud says, “I’m sorry,” and I shrug. There’s not much she could have done.

“Come see my reaping notes,” I say, and she does.

____________________________________

 

**PUCK**

I’m not convinced Tommy isn’t mad but I’m pleased I’m allowed to wear my robe in front of him. I’m not squeamish, exactly, but there’s something about being on television that makes me more private than normal.

Tommy has pretty lips and hair that I might be a little jealous of. He hasn’t done much to alter himself as far as I’m aware, beside the pop of bronze liner that brings out his eyes, so for all intents and purposes he seems trustworthy right until the point where he tells me he wants me and Brian to be underwater during the chariot ride.

I cycle through numerous questions before settling on “How?”

“It’s simple, really,” he says, grinning. “A water tank. You two will be — how shall I put this — a splash, my dear.”

The next few hours blur past me. He’s left me to my prep team while he talks with Brian, a rare arrangement having left District Four with only one stylist between us. I’m not sure why, exactly, and Tommy hasn’t offered an explanation.

My team flits around me like the tropical fish in the aquarium just off the market square. There are only three of them, but they still feel as though they’re adopting me into their school. Especially while they’re painting my eyelids a shimmering purple and adding what looks like pale green scales to my arms and face.

I wonder briefly what Gabe and Finn will think tonight about the parade, whether they’ll bring themselves to watch. I know they will. There’s something about the parade that forces you to witness it, even when you’d rather not, and especially when a loved one is part of it.

The woman plopping split pearls around my eyes tsks at me, swiping underneath my eye to stop my tear from streaking the makeup.

“Don’t go crying on us, now,” she says briskly. “What a waste of powder that would be.”

And I hate her, a little bit. The idea that my emotions could ruin the Games for her.

The other two avoid my eyes and pluck at my newly curled hair, spraying it in the hopes that the water won’t ruin it. They turn me around and I think at first that I’m seeing one of the mermaids from the stories, the ones with beautiful lips and sharp teeth. The kind that drown fishermen.

For the first time in years I don’t recognize my mother in my face and I smile and I look deadly enough to have a place in the Games, to be a creature from the depths.

Tommy comes back into the room with a bag, whistling, and I have an urge to join in. He sends the prep team to check on Brian and then says, “You look stunning, Puck,” and it feels like a real compliment. I grin wider and the mirror reflects an unnatural girl back to me. I love it.

“Thanks,” I say. I point to the bag. “Is that mine?”

He gives me a look that says _you bet it is_ and a smile so wide he could eat a watermelon slice whole. He unzips the bag, helping me into the silvery, flowy top and what can only be described as a tail. There are strands of fabric floating off both the top and tail and I can only imagine how spectral and lovely they’ll look floating underwater. The tail has a clever zipper itself, for which I’m grateful; hopping down to the prep room below the Training Center would not leave sponsors lining up to give me money.

Tommy props his elbow on my shoulder elegantly, taking in our reflection in the mirror. Then he frowns. I don’t have time to guess why before he’s rooting through the jewelry on the table.

“Is there something wrong?”

“You just have the one,” he says, holding up a pearl earring. “Unless this is a custom I haven’t heard of—?”

“It’s my token. My mother’s.”

Tommy’s grimace morphs into a slash of understanding. He gently puts in the earring.

“There’s just one thing left,” he says. He kisses the side of my head affectionately and it’s so unexpected that I laugh. I can’t help thinking that, if I’d met him back home, we would be fast friends. I try to forget the fact that he’s readying me for a last hurrah before the arena.

The last thing turns out to be a beautiful piece of thin, shimmering green netting with pearls set into it at odd intervals. Tommy fixes it with pins in my hair as if it were a veil and he squeezes my shoulders and I feel so, so alive.

____________

 

The elevator down to the chariots is quick and I am thankful Sean and Dory Maud and Brian take the lead on the conversation. I’m very aware of Sean and desperately want not to be; after the talk I had with Dory Maud I’ve sworn to avoid any accusation of entanglement, as she put it. I don’t want the Gamemakers to have any reason to make the Games worse than it’s already promised to be.

Elizabeth leads me and Brian to our water-altered chariot and then goes off to visit with the escort from District Nine. Brian elbows me, his eyebrow raised significantly, as Elizabeth laughs for the first time we’ve known her. The other woman’s cheeks are flushed as well.

“Lovers?” I ask, distantly curious. It’s a welcome distraction from the fact that, as Brian is dressed nearly to match, I can see much more of him than usual. His tail is a shimmery dark green and they’ve plopped some silvery jewels around his eyes as well. I’ve seen him without a shirt before of course — fishermen have a habit in the district to wander around shirtless as often as not — but the jewelry Tommy’s dressed him in is designed to direct attention to the muscles in his chest, stomach, and back is a way that’s entirely different than anything he’s worn before. Or not worn.

I need to stop thinking about this before my face bursts into flames.

Brian says, “I’d say that’s a distinct possibility.” His voice seems amused and it seems angled at me and I glare at him. “What?”

“Nothing,” I mutter. Sean catches my eye, face politely curious, and I turn toward the chariot.

One of the coordinators for the parade runs past all twelve chariots, frantically motioning for everyone to climb in. I look at the water tank they’ve bolted to ours, scanning for a way to get in.

A hand on my bicep to get my attention, then gone. “There’s a ladder on the side,” Sean says quietly.

So there is. It’s designed to look as clear as the tank itself and I’m thankful for the gritty texture they’ve made the rungs. Wouldn’t want to fall in front of the other tributes, especially not since Two has been staring like they’d like to fry Brian and me alive.

I hop down, expecting to be cold and wet immediately. There’s something wrong about the water somehow, though. Instead of actually touching either of us, it seems to be pushing away from us as if it were repelled by our bodies. My hair and the fins of our tails still ebb and flow with the not-water’s movements in the tank but we ourselves are fixed in place unless we touch the sides of the glass.

Brian mirrors my amazement. “How—?”

“There’s no shortage of things we can do in the Capitol,” Elizabeth snips. “Smile and wave for the crowd now, there are sponsors to win tonight.”

Dory Maud says, “Work with it as best you can. Somersaults and flips, anything. This is above and beyond anything they’ve seen before. Use that.”

“Tommy was telling me you should be able to breathe in it, too,” Sean adds. He’s not looking at either of us, instead searching the rest of the room like the birds that swoop down and snatch fish straight from the sea. His eyes flick back to us as he says, “Put on a show.”

District One’s horses have begun to move. Our mentors back away from us now, talking underneath their breath, and Dory Maud gives us a wave and an exaggerated reminder to smile bright. Brian waves back cheerfully.

The music is now so loud that I can’t hear when Brian speaks the first time. He shouts now, practically in my ear, and says, “Hands? Please?”

In answer I find his hand and lace our fingers together. I am reminded so strongly of the reaping, of the fact that we were nearly done, and the unfairness flares scaldingly hot.

I have to be smiling. I have to force myself to realize that survival means playing these Games and playing the game means not outwardly glaring at everyone we see tonight. I bump into Brian, like I’ve done so many times before, and his mouth twitches into something like his old grin, and I am suddenly, selfishly, glad he’s here. Even here, he is steady.

I can’t think about how his steadiness may get me killed in the arena.

We submerge and take a breath, and then our chariot moves.

____________________________________

 

**SEAN**

Dory Maud watches me and Tommy leave with an expression that says she doesn’t expect to see me again. I’d be concerned, but she always looks like this when President Malvern calls for me.

I’m lying. Half of me is worried he’s found out what we’re planning, but there is no future in worrying about what he may or may not know.

I’m given exactly thirty minutes by my Peacekeeper escort to change and freshen up as needed. Tommy takes me into the bathroom and styles my hair himself, adding flecks of crushed pearl as he deems necessarily. He adds some to my collarbones as well, dusts my cheeks and eyelids. I’ve learned by now not to argue. Malvern likes when I’m matching my tributes.

Tommy and I use a few of our precious minutes to discuss who Malvern’s likely assigning me to tonight. It could be anyone, really; the list of wealthy Capitol citizens wanting their hands on a piece of the Games is by no means short. I can only hope it will be someone I can manipulate into sponsoring Brian or Puck even as I am myself being manipulated.

He brushes the same deep purple over my lips that he used on Puck’s eyes and kisses my forehead the way he did when I was his tribute. He pins my token over my heart and says, “Are you ready?”

I say, “I must be.”

____________

 

The car ride to the mansion is smooth and is too short for me to reckon with what I may have to do tonight. Even as late as it is, Malvern still has jockeys putting horses through their paces. The jockeys wear body armor and the horses are caught between equine and aquatic features. I puzzle this over for a heartbeat, then let the thought go. There are other mysteries I must feel out tonight.

The gravel driveway curves softly in front of the mansion and it is here that I depart the car, giving the silent chauffeur my thanks. I am very aware of how alone I am as I knock on the giant wooden door.

It swings open immediately, the Avox waiting for my coat apparently stationed here to welcome me as soon as I arrive. As always when I am in Malvern’s house, I take in my surroundings carefully, pinpointing the telltale glints from camera lenses in shadowed corners. I have to assume there are more I do not see, but knowing the location of these five relaxes me.

I count five more as we dive deeper into the depths of the hallways. The path to his study must be more straightforward than this twisting route we’re taking, but it seems custom to confuse me as much as possible while I am here. Malvern, for this reason, reminds me strongly of an octopus muttation, always carefully keeping an arm wrapped around his victims while using the others to distract and mislead.

The Avox finally shows me to Malvern’s study and bows. I thank her, and she nods before fading back into the shadows across the hall.

“Come in,” Malvern says. I hadn’t even knocked.

President Malvern’s study is as pleasant as can be considering the man sitting behind the desk, its walls a shimmering light blue, the accents a shade darker than the bronze Tommy wears on his eyes.

He is studying me closely but I pretend not to care. There’s a large TV mounted on the wall to my left and it displays the parade in high color so I watch. I wonder briefly how he’s explained away his absence tonight, but I feel the thought catch in tension around my mouth, and I shove it aside. I have to consciously relax my hands.

“Sean Kendrick.”

I raise my eyebrows, looking at him now. Benjamin Malvern stares back at me levelly. He is a solid man, around my height when he stands. Even now, sitting, he is intimidating. He fingers an elegant letter opener and I try not to think about the boy from Three I killed with a knife in his neck.

Without speaking, Malvern slides open the envelope and I know the showmanship is only for my benefit. There is no chance he does not already know who has asked for me tonight. He scans it, face registering shock and surprise around his mouth and forehead; nothing shows in his eyes. Malvern’s trying to play with me again. I smile, grim, because this dance is one I know.

He sets the letter aside and appraises me. “What do you know,” he says, slow and deliberate, “about Gamemaker rituals?”

“I don’t follow,” I say, because I don’t. Where is he going with this?

Malvern orders tea from one of the menus and does not speak until it arrives. Spooning salt, butter, and milk into the cup, he says, “Gamemaker rituals. You have been here, behind the scenes, for several years now. I expect you’ve absorbed something by now.”

“I know they work in shifts,” I say. “That they cycle through attacking the even numbered districts, starting with Twelve, and then work backwards before doing the same with the odd numbered districts.”

“Hmm.” He takes a sip. “I meant more along the lines of, ah. Mythology.”

I cannot think what he means. I stay silent.

“No? Disappointing. You know that every year the Gamemakers fill certain roles depending on their status, of course.” I nod, but he’s watching the parade instead of me. “Epona, the Head Gamemaker. Corr, the second in command. And Skata, the wildcard, the one given rein to disrupt everything.”

Here Malvern turns back to me and waits for me to speak. I say, “Yes,” even though the name Skata is new to me. I remember them using code names when the mentors are in the Situation Room, but I had never realized how intricately simple their roles are. My fingers itch for my notebook.

“There is an opening.”

His gaze on me is cool. I frown. He can’t possibly mean—

“My son, Matthew, will be Skata,” Malvern says smoothly. He adds more salt to his tea.

Matthew Malvern won his Games my first mentor year. He was sixteen and a surprise, for the entire Capitol and the rest of Thisby; no other president had had a child in the Games. It soon came out during his interview with George Holly that Matthew had been an the product of a wine-doused night during the president’s visit to District Two. The footage of that moment had subsequently been accidentally destroyed, but the shock pervaded throughout the Games.

That year had ended quickly. I remember the tense discussions the Gamemakers had in whispers, trying to find the middle ground between killing the other tributes to get Matthew to safety and trying to pretend, at the very least, to be fair. In the end they released a swarm of lion-esque muttations that seemed genetically programmed to target everyone but Malvern’s son, earning him the name Mutt in every district but his own.

I killed both tributes from Two my year in the Games. When Mutt and I met the year after he won as mentors, I learned one had been his best friend, the other the girl he wished to marry. He has unrelentingly targeted my tributes every year since. Mutt Malvern at the controls of the Gamemaker Simulation is, at the very least, every bit a nightmare.

No doubt Malvern knows this, wishes to undermine my certainty in my tributes’ safety. No doubt he knows about last night on the train.

The camera filming the parade chooses this moment to zoom in on Puck and Brian in their tank. I can faintly hear the crowd screaming their names, a sound that intensifies when Tommy illuminates the water itself. It glows off their skin. They look like the mermaids in the stories my mother and Peg told me while I grew up.

Puck’s body language is relaxed except for her right hand, which is tight around Brian’s like a vise. Her eyes, though, are bright, and this alongside Brian’s easy posture reassures me.

“Beautiful this year,” Malvern says, staring at me like he wants me to know he saw me looking at her. A cool breeze kisses the back of my neck but I refuse to shudder in front of him.

He seems to want me to say something. “They are.”

I want to tell Dory Maud what I’ve learned tonight, want to find some way to counter Mutt’s plans for the arena. Tomorrow the first day of training begins, and we need to have a strategy for Brian and Puck in place. We need to find out what our tributes can do outside of floating in a tank of water.

I want so much to be anywhere other than here, being told that a Cabinet member’s son asked for a night with me as a wedding gift. His wedding is tomorrow, Malvern says, and tells me to give him something to compare tomorrow night with. The first time he told me something like this I was weeks before my seventeenth birthday.

I don’t want to remember the Gamemaker’s face as she held my life, again, in her hands, so I watch the TV go around to the chariots once more as they file back into the Training Center. Gorry is probably in the crowd right now giving odds on the tributes.

Then I realize.

“President Malvern,” I say. He is reading something at his desk, but he waves for me to continue. “I’d like to make a wager.”

Now I have his attention. “What’s your offer?”

What I’m debating is not technically legal. Mentors are not allowed to place bets on their tributes, let alone with the president. But Malvern has known me for seven years, is interested in the fact that my father was a tribute and that his son despises me. And this arrangement is not technically legal, either.

I say, “My tribute wins, and you free me from this.”

He laughs and it sounds as if I’ve genuinely amused him. “‘Free you.’ As if you were enslaved to me.”

“You killed my mother,” I say. “You threatened my housekeeper and nurse a mere three months ago. Am I not?”

“What do I win, if you fail?”

“I stay in the Capitol. You have me wait on however many elites as you wish and I give you their secrets.”

Malvern mulls this over. “Why don’t I simply do this now?”

I say, “How will you explain the disappearance of a seven-year victor at the very beginning of the Games?”

I nearly add, _because you like to gamble, and you like your opponents to know when you’ve bested them._ It’s a near thing.

“The odds are in your favor,” I say, and my voice is quieter than I need it to be right now.

“They are,” he muses. “I accept your terms, Sean Kendrick.”

I hold my hand out and he shakes. What I’ve done is beginning to sink deep inside me to nest around my spine and I cannot afford to process it right now, not with this assignment still to come.

Malvern doesn’t smile but his expression still reads as pleased no matter how much he tries to hide it. It strikes me that he likely wants me to know he thinks he will win, especially now that his son will be Skata this year. But I had to at least try.

“An Avox will show you to your rooms for the next four hours,” Malvern says dismissively. “I’m sure you remember them, but just in case.”

I nod stiffly. My fingers are on the doorknob just as he says, “And Sean. Do try to have fun tonight.”

The door does not slam, is designed to float back to the doorjamb as gently as possible. I wish it could.

____________________________________

**PUCK**

Dory Maud and Elizabeth are beside themselves, they’re so pleased.

“You should have seen how it looked from the audience,” Elizabeth says, straightening my veil of pearls with awestruck hands. This is the happiest I’ve seen her. Despite the circumstances, I turn to Brian and laugh, pleasantly buzzing with the after effects of the not-water. He pulls me in for a hug and I let him. There’s a faint reminder humming at the back of my skull that this is likely to be one of the last hugs I ever receive.

Dory Maud glances at us curiously and we part right as the elevator reaches our floor.

District Four’s training apartments are themed so as to be reminiscent of home without the poverty, hunger, and sunburn. Admittedly, Four has comparable luxury to some of the other districts, Twelve in particular. We are a favorite of the Capitol for the seafood we catch. But the Capitol’s favor doesn’t trickle too far down, not nearly enough to smooth over everything in the District. Not even after Mooneyham and the merchants have divided the favors as evenly as they can.

The rooms here are sleekly blue, dark blue, green, and honey brown. I take off the flats Tommy gave me to wear while my tail wasn’t zipped up and the carpet here is the same as the kind on the train. Everything is nonaggressive, and if I weren’t going to be fighting for my life in a matter of three days, this would be a pleasant place to live.

Dory Maud sends me and Brian off to shower and to rest. We have to be up early, she reminds us, for training. She’s massaging her temples and ordering a glass of wine at the table when we go down the hallway.

We hug again before splitting and in my ear he’s asking, “Where’s Sean?”

“I have no idea,” I say. He wishes me goodnight, his forehead scrunched together.

Carefully, I take out the pearls in my hair and around my eyes and in my left earlobe. The makeup on my face, arms, and chest seems to only want to come off with a cream I find in the bathroom, so I lather it on thick and hope for the best. I leave my top and tail in the garment bag Tommy brought up.

I’m prepared for a shower, but almost fall against the door when I realize they’ve given me a bathtub. It’s easily six times the length of my body if not longer and set eight feet into the floor. Taps around the edges fill it quickly and efficiently with warm water, and a panel against the wall sends bubbles floating throughout the entire room.

This is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in all my life. I almost cry as I slide in and I do cry while doing some laps, but I’m hard pressed to say whether it’s from the bathtub or the soap or the fact that I thought I wouldn’t swim, truly swim, ever again.

The clock programmed into the wall is telling me it’s very, very late. I submerge one last time before kicking off the bottom, fly upward, and push myself out of the water.

____________

 

In my dreams, I’m swimming in the ocean outside the harbor and there are no poisoned rocks in the water. Finn in on a boat next to me and he scans the horizon and tells me there’s a storm coming in from the West, and he’s wearing my matching earring, and he is safe.

Gabe swims up behind me and I splash him and he laughs, and it’s been since before our parents died that I’ve heard him laugh, and I am crying when I wake up.

I try to fall back asleep but it’s too quiet without the waves nearby. This room, which felt so huge only four hours ago, seems to be crushing me.

Without thinking about it I’m throwing the blankets off and putting on the sweater I wore on the train. There’s no one in the hallway, for which I’m grateful; Dory Maud and Elizabeth would surely be upset if they knew I was awake, given how important it is that I’m rested for training tomorrow. I almost can’t bring myself to care.

I am nearly unsurprised when I see a dark head of hair on the couch in front of the TV. He’s concentrating hard on the program, so I take my time looking at him. He has the kind of face that makes you think it’ll nick you if he gets too close to you, sharp and edged unforgivingly like the mountains in the East. He has the kind of lips that make you want to risk the cuts. There’s a dark reddish-purple blotch under his jaw, and I flush without quite knowing why.

“You’re up late,” I say, repeating his words back to him. They catch on the inside of my throat and I have to cough to clear them.

He just says, “As are you,” and clears his notes and things to one side of the couch so I can sit beside him.

We sit in silence for what feels like an hour but is only fifteen minutes. I’m yawning now, the brief burst of energy that woke me up having passed. I want to ask him about just under his jaw.

The knowledge that Dory Maud spoke to us both is hanging in the air between us. I feel impulsive, like I’m going to say or do something I regret. Finn tells me this is always how I am when I’m tired. He isn’t wrong.

I figure I don’t have many more opportunities for spontaneous honesty.

“Where were you?”

Sean has the decency not to dodge the question. “Which time?”

“During the parade,” I say, and yawn again. “And after. And just now, too, if this is a separate time.”

“I don’t know how much I’m allowed to tell you,” he says evenly. He writes something down next to the male tribute from District Eleven.

This is, oddly, insulting. “You realize I could be dead in four days, right?”

He considers me now. I scootch on the couch until I’m facing him, my palms purposefully facing upward and placed on my knees. My parents always taught me to fake openness until trust is established and I can truly act on it. I’m hoping Sean will accept the offering.

He snaps his journal shut and says. “Have you seen the pool yet?”

“Not unless you mean the one in my bathroom, no.”

“It’s sublevel five,” he says. “You’re free to use it, it’s an open secret. It’s been there since the arena flooded that one year ages ago. Not much spectacle in drownings.”

We take the elevator down, not bothering to grab swimsuits. I can smell the chlorine before we see the signs for the pool.

“They’ve altered the water, the same way Tommy did for the parade.” Sean holds open the swinging double doors for me and I follow.

The air in the natatorium is just slightly warmer than the rest of the building. It’s not helping my tiredness, and it makes it difficult to take in the entirety of the room.

I say, “To prevent drowning?”

He nods and presses a button on the panel to the right of the door. Music pipes in from speakers hidden in the walls, and light timed with the beat flickers over the entire room. Sean’s bathed in red.

There are huge steps built into the wall, smaller steps dividing them into sections. It takes me until Sean sits on the larger steps to realize that this is where spectators would watch races. I sit, facing him, and he tells me.

____________

 

In the morning, Elizabeth and Dory Maud wake me from dreams in which I drown but can’t seem to die. Dory Maud’s face is pinched and vaguely worried. I hope for all I’m worth and more that I wasn’t yelling in my sleep.

There are eggs for breakfast and more seafood than I’ve ever seen in the bottom of my nets at home. I have no appetite. I can’t help thinking how much Finn would love to see this bread and these pastries, how he’d want to see how it is exactly that the chefs can create something so fluffy and flakey that it dissolves on your tongue.

Thoughts of home and what my brothers are doing now flash through my mind the entire meal. Brian senses my mood, I think; he casually taps my shoulder now and then to draw me into conversation. I’m grateful for it. It seems to relax Dory Maud, at the very least. Sean, on the other hand, shrugs just so slightly, frowning. I don’t know him well but I know enough to be certain that he’s apologetic. For what, I’m not sure.

Elizabeth hurries me and Brian to the elevator as soon as the plates are cleared. She hops from one foot to the other, checking her watch the entire four seconds it takes for the doors to ding and open. Brian jabs me in the stomach, sure and swift, and I must have been making a face at her.

“What’s the plan for training?” I ask.

Brian sighs. “You weren’t listening?”

“I wasn’t not listening,” I say back, irritated. “There wasn’t much strategy in going on and on about how perfectly they cook crab in the Capitol.”

“We go to every station,” he says, “and take note of any tributes we want as allies. Dory Maud said to downplay anything we’re exceptional at, so no fishing, unfortunately.”

I manage a smile for his joke. “No tridents, nets, or knots. Pity.”

“Or sunburns,” he adds pointedly.

“That was one time.”

He squawks indignantly. “I trusted you. I had ‘Brian Carroll has dough for lungs’ burned into my back for weeks!”

I say, “I’m terribly sorry about it,” but I’m laughing. Just as well. I don’t want to tell him that, at breakfast, I was thinking about being a victor in Malvern’s Capitol. Sean is more truthful than eloquent and his story left a sour taste in my mouth that no amount of hot chocolate will ever ease away.

____________

 

The training room is immense, roughly half the size as the harbor back home. It’s stocked with bows and arrows, weights, spears and projectiles, all at various stations. There’s a set of throwing knives between a fire starting station and a set of bars that catches my interest. Gabe and I used to have contests when we were younger, used to throw paring knives back and forth between two boats if the fish weren’t biting. We’d only lost three in the eight years I’ve been helping him.

The woman in charge gives us a very rehearsed speech about the expectations of the next three days. Only Brian, myself, and the young boy from Six seem to be paying any attention. The tributes from One and Two have already begun looking us all over, checking for weaknesses. I wonder if they’ll try an alliance with the two of us. Four has been a Career district in the Games the last seven years since Sean won.

I can only remember two of their names. Nils and Esther, the tributes from Two who looked as if they’d like to throttle us last night. They’re both projecting the type of cockiness that would earn me reduced rations back home.

Brian slips his hand into mine easily the moment we are dismissed to start training. “Where to first?”

I tug him over to the fire starting station in response, hoping for an opportunity to assess our opponents. Three hours in, I determine that the girl tribute from Seven is too skilled with axes for my liking; the camouflage station is maybe thirty-five feet past the targets set in the middle of the room, but she still manages to bury the axehead into a post three inches from my head.

I shriek. My heart is pounding so fast I worry it’ll bruise my ribs. The axe gleams wicked sharp, and Brian’s on his feet and halfway across the room the second it lands.

“Brian, don’t—”

Peacekeepers start making their way from the edge of the room. I grab Brian’s sleeve, but he shrugs me off, shouting, “Is the arena not enough, Seven?”

She’s laughing and I want to punch her in the throat.

Her district partner steps between her and Brian, his hands held up as a casual warning. I’m cross for a moment that he’s able to do what I was trying to do. Brian, still noticeably tense, stills.

“Keep it to the Games,” the male tribute from Seven says. “Alright?”

The girl smirks over her shoulder at us as he drags her to the tributes from One and Two, who are trying and failing to hide their laughter.

“Come on,” I say, my voice quiet but firm. He follows me to edible plants station without arguing. “Low profile, remember?”

He picks up a berry and rolls it between his fingers. “She almost killed you.”

“These are the Games.” I don’t say what he’s probably thinking, how fights are forbidden until the cameras are there to capture it. “The arena will be worse, Brian. Thank you, but. We won’t be able to get there if we pick fights with everyone who tries to intimidate us.”

“I wasn’t intimidated,” he says, glancing at me. “She almost _killed_ you. You’re my best friend. She didn’t intimidate me, she terrified me.”

I don’t know what to say to this. I lean against his side and when he puts his arm around me, he is shaking.

One of us, minimum, will be dead in the next few weeks. Not for the first time I reevaluate Brian in terms of the arena; he’s strong, quick, and sure. He is my oldest friend — it would make the arena a little less awful to have him there. A little more, too, for obvious reasons.

He charged Seven to protect me. I can’t let him do that. If I’m seen as weak it will be worse for both of us in the Games; they’ll target me to provoke him, and that might get us both killed. There’s not much I can do to keep him safe from the Gamemakers, but I refuse to be the reason one of our fellow tributes kill him.

His survival and my own are at such odds that I force myself not to imagine what it would be like if we were the last two. Brian squeezes me distractedly, leafing through the trainer’s book of plants, and then lets me go.

____________________________________

 

**SEAN**

I haven’t told Dory Maud yet, about the deal with Malvern or the fact that Malvern’s son will be a Gamemaker this year. She’s so stressed right now that if she were a coral reef she would have been dead for a week at least.

Another part of me, one that isn’t as small as I’d like, is worried for her reaction. I very likely have doomed Puck and Brian in a moment of selfishness.

We’d heard whispers about the opening after the Games last year through the usual underground channels. I remember the night Annie told us she was putting her name forward, although she was worried her blindness would hinder her chances. Dory Maud had made some quip about how she’d probably only have to hit random buttons anyway, and isn’t that all they ever do, stand around hitting levers just because? We’d fallen quiet after that.

I’d been hoping my assignation would have been with her. We haven’t yet been able to meet and formulate a plan. Dory Maud would have protested us meeting alone — she doesn’t like to be left out — but it would have worked. It should have. And here we are, four days from the arena, and we have nothing firm enough to hold in our hands.

Puck and Brian are more subdued than usual tonight and I am concerned before I remember how it feels to be in that room. How on edge you become, the weapons in your fingers making the Games real.

“So?” Dory Maud asks, looking between them. “How’d it go?”

Puck laughs without humor. “I don’t think Seven likes me much.” Brian snorts.

“Why is that funny?” I ask, quiet.

They seem to have an argument without words while we wait. Elizabeth raps her long nails on the table and I let myself be annoyed at the noise instead of trying to analyze this closeness between the two of them. I don’t think they’re seeing each other. I am unsure and hesitant to determine why, exactly, I care, other than the fact that it will decide their behavior in the arena. My interest goes beyond that. I can’t allow it to.

Puck seems to lose the debate. She sighs, hunches defensively over her sushi, and says, “She threw an axe at me and Brian tried to fight her.”

“Threw an _axe_ at you?” Dory Maud says. Her wine glass trembles in her hand.

There is something squeezing my throat. “That’s illegal. She can’t—” I pause, but there are no words forthcoming.

Puck shrugs as if she doesn’t care and Brian says, “The arena’ll be awful, won’t it?”

Neither Dory Maud nor I say anything; what else is there to say? He clears his throat. “She’s — Sean, Dory Maud, I know you have to — divide us between yourselves, or something, but please—”

“No,” Puck says, sharper than I’ve ever heard her. “You can’t ask for that. I know what you’re going to say and I won’t let you.”

“Puck—”

Elizabeth holds up a hand. “What is happening here?”

“He wants them to save me,” Puck says. She stabs her fork into her crab. “At risk of himself.”

I was expecting this from the moment they hugged the first time we arrived in these rooms. I’ve mentored friends exactly once before, my second year as mentor. They made it to the final eight, but it did not go well for them afterward.

“We cannot allow that,” I say, as the same time Dory Maud says, “Not a damn chance.”

Puck says, “I won’t either.”

Brian reaches for her hand, but she wipes furiously at her eyes and his fingers settle on his glass instead. He’s watching her when he says, “Then I’ll die, so you have to allow it.”

She muffles a shriek with her napkin and Dory Maud takes my hand because this is, cobwebbed with time, what Mary said seven years ago at this very same table. Puck sprints down the hallway and her door slams shut.

“Katie-kat—”

“Don’t,” I say softly, and Brian slowly sits back down. “Give her a moment.”

“You love her,” Elizabeth says bluntly. She pours herself another glass of wine, and it slops over the sides.

I force myself to unclench my right hand, to set my fork down.

Brian is faintly pink. “Once,” he says, “in the way you’re thinking. She’s my best friend. Of course I love her.”

“Legally, we can’t do what you’re asking. But you knew that already, correct?” Dory Maud asks, leaning forward. She is not truly asking a question. “What are you actually proposing, Brian?”

Brian mimics her and his expression is earnest and open and worried. “Help me keep her alive.”

____________

 

Tonight I am prepared for the fact that Puck will be sitting beside me while I make my lists. She tucks her legs close to her chest without comment, looking impossibly cozy in a huge sweater and blanket.

I don’t know what to say to her other than, “You’re up late.”

Puck settles more firmly onto the couch but doesn’t verbally reply. I draw something resembling my token to give myself something to focus on other than the fact that she could be dead in mere days.

“You can’t let him.”

Her voice is scratched raw. I tell her, “I can’t stop him in the arena.”

Puck turns to face me full-on and she reminds me of Brian a few hours before. She reaches out, and then hesitates. I don’t know if I am disappointed she stopped herself.

She says, “If you send me things, then, send things I can use for both of us. I can’t let him die for me.”

What she isn’t saying is, _life would be unbearable._ I hear it all the same because it is the song I wake up to every morning.

I tell her, “I’ll do my best.”

The screen shows George Holly interviewing the Head Gamemaker, but it is too late right now to worry about this. It’s always the same chat this early in the games anyway. Day one after the initial bloodbath, when they’re analyzing the tributes’ fighting styles and skill and how this will affect the betting, then I’ll be sure to pay more attention. I close my notebook and turn off the TV.

“Sean,” Puck says, and I look at her. Her voice sounds as though she’s drowned saying my name; there’s accusation and desperation beading through every letter.

She already looks haunted. I don’t want to think what her eyes will look like if she makes it out of this, now that she knows the Games don’t let you go so easily.

“Puck?”

“Promise me.” She shivers a little, but her voice is steady.

I say, “I promise.”

She whispers, “Thank you.”

We are quiet for a time. Somewhere, miles from here, our sea sings softly. I wonder if it pulls her, too. There is so much I wanted from my life outside of the Games.

“You should get some rest, Kate Connolly. Puck Connolly.”

“You too, Sean Kendrick.” I smile faintly. There’s a yawn as she stands and stretches. Right before she leaves for the hallway, she says, “Goodnight.”

“Sleep well.”

____________

 

Dory Maud turns to me immediately after Elizabeth whisks Brian and Puck off to training. I raise my eyebrows, my heart pounding. She and Peg have always been able to read me best, and I can tell from the way she’s chewing on the inside of her lip that Dory Maud’s seeing through me.

“It’s been awhile since we’ve been to the roof, hasn’t it,” she says, in a way that doesn’t invite a question so much as a firm and leading statement.

I say, “We should ask Tommy and Annie to join,” and Dory Maud tells me they’re already on their way.

In no time at all we have blankets and food packed even though we’ve just eaten, ostensibly spending the rest of the day at our picnic. It’s too much to hope that we aren’t being observed. When they arrive I hand Tommy the wine and we head to the roof.

“Shouldn’t you two be schmoozing some rich public figures?” Tommy asks, sounding careless to anyone who doesn’t know him well.

Dory Maud uses his question to state our agreed alibi for the sake of the cameras. “And why do you think we’ve asked you two here today?”

Annie laughs and says, “I wondered. Not for the company, surely.”

We laugh now, all of us, and I cannot be the only one who hears the anger and revolution lurking just underneath it. None of us can comment on it so no one does, but the conversation is just a shade too bright, too happy afterward for any of us to pretend it were normal.

____________________________________

 

**PUCK**

The time passes too quickly. I spend two more nights next to Sean and Brian and Dory Maud, peering through our mentors’ notes on all of the tributes while trying not to yawn. Two more nights of them answering our questions, of Dory Maud with a wine glass in her hand, of Elizabeth frowning at her food as though it had insulted her stupid red wig. Of her glaring at me as if she knew exactly what I was thinking about her stupid red wig.

Two more mornings and afternoons spent at training with Brian beside me, trying to ignore how the tributes from One, Two, and Seven smirk as they look us over. They haven’t gotten closer to us than the first day, though, so I let myself relax as best I can when Brian and I are both still about to be thrown into the greatest fight of the rest of our short lives.

We learn some useful things, like how to tell poisonous berries apart from non-poisonous ones and how to properly throw spears and how the boy tribute from Six, the youngest here, is very clever with analyzing weather patterns in a way that makes me miss Finn so much it aches. In return for sharing his knowledge, Brian gives him a quick demonstration with a net and trident, explaining how to best use both, and I show him how to throw knives properly. He thanks us, and it is too much for me to consider the fact that he will have to die if Brian is to survive.

Breakfast the last day of training is quiet. Brian has my hand in a tight grip under the table, and I smooth my thumb over the back of his hand to try and soothe him. It is all I can do to not shake myself apart.

“How is training going?” Dory Maud asks us. She is, for the first time I’ve noticed, not nursing a glass of wine this morning.

“Fine,” I say.

She presses on. “Any allies you’re considering? Today’s nearly the last day to declare them, there isn’t much time after the interviews to have anything set in stone.”

Brian and I look at each other and as his mouth is currently stuffed with food, I am the one to say, “The boy from Six.”

“Padgett?” Sean says, frowning as he reaches for his notebook. “He’s the thirteen year old, isn’t he?”

I don’t know why he bothers asking us things like this about the others. He’s the one with the journal.

“Yes,” Brian says, because he’s better than I am.

Dory Maud looks at us. “Why this boy?”

“He’ll be useful,” I say, my attention on my plate. “He knows how to accurately tell the weather.” I catch her eyes now. “It could be all the difference. That one year with that storm that came from almost nowhere, the tribute from Eleven won because she knew to read the arena and get to shelter.”

Sean and Dory Maud share a look like they’re considering my words. Dory Maud raises an eyebrow at Brian, waiting for him to say something.

When he speaks, his voice is hoarse. “He reminds me of Jonathan. Just in the laugh.”

We are quiet for a time after that.

After the servants have cleared our plates and glasses, Elizabeth claps her hands briskly. “Now then. Today, as you know, will be your training assessments with the Gamemakers. It’s very, very important that you do your absolute best, as these scores will help win you sponsors. Do try to keep their attention.”

“Must keep them entertained,” I say. Brian holds my hand tighter at that and frowns at me. I mouth _what?_ at him, but he just shakes his head.

“Well, yes,” Elizabeth replies, nonplussed. “They will have had a very long day even by the time you two show up.”

“How awful for them, to have to sit through our demonstrations.” I push my chair back and reclaim my hand, rubbing my palm to ease the memory of Brian’s grip. “Meanwhile we’ll focus on not dying, I suppose.”

“Do that,” Elizabeth snaps.

Dory Maud and Sean both make sounds that suggest a laugh swallowed too quickly. I stand, and Sean raises his glass to me again like he did on the train, his eyes smiling.

____________

 

Peacekeepers escort us all to a smallish room to wait while the male tribute from One goes into his session. It feels like, I think, the sort of tension that fills the boat when we don’t have anything much to show for hours out on the water. Not everyone seems to be feeling it; the Careers are loudly rehashing the winning moments from the last seven Games.

“What’re you going to do?” I ask Brian, quiet enough that the Careers’ conversation covers my voice.

He takes my hand like he had at breakfast and absently runs his thumb over my knuckles. “Probably something with the tridents,” he says. “I’m not sure what else to do, really. They don’t have water in the room, so fishing’s out.”

“That’s not all you’re good at.” Brian scoffs softly and lets go of my hand in order to run his hands through his curls. I recognize this action from school, when he’d be so frustrated with fractions that his hair would end up looking like the anemones Finn keeps in an aquarium in his room.

I turn his face toward me so he has to make eye contact. “I mean it,” I say. I hope he can hear the conviction in my voice. “You have as good a shot as anyone. More than.”

“You too, Puck.”

They call his name and then I am by myself.

____________

 

Our mentors waste no time in ambushing us. Dory Maud tsks about a cut on my sleeve, I think, while Sean has Brian go through his session second by second, it seems. Neither of us have much to tell. Brian tells us how he wove a net from some vines in the camouflage station and trapped and stabbed several manikins before throwing the trident through the center of the archery targets. They’d been impressed, he says, or they seemed like they’d paused eating enough to notice him at least.

“District Four has that advantage,” Sean says. “We always have, but it’s different for you two this year. You’re from a Career District, but you haven’t allied with One, Two, or Seven. They want to know what you’re going to do in the Games. They don’t much like too many variables in play at one time.”

“Seems strange,” I say. “I thought it’d make for more interesting television.”

Dory Maud sips her wine. “It does. And they can spin it, but they can’t always control it. That’s always going to be terrifying to a Gamemaker.”

“What happens if they can’t?” Brian asks. There is an expression on his face that I’ve never seen before. It’s challenging and serious and determined.

“People die,” Sean says to his bread roll.

“Who—” I begin to ask, but Elizabeth forcefully asks how my session went, and I have to let the question go to tell them about my knife throwing. No one looks convinced that I’ve dropped it or won’t ambush them about it later, and I like them a little more for it.

Tommy trips out of the elevator an hour later, his hair perfectly styled with little pearls dotting his curls. He sweeps me up and presses his lips to my hair, gives Brian a huge hug, and kisses Dory Maud and Elizabeth on both cheeks. To my surprise, he even manages to coax a smile and laugh from Sean. It seems to slough years off his face. I am reminded again how young he became a victor, how soon it was afterward that Malvern handed him off to his Capitol friends.

Elizabeth ushers us all to the living room and turns on the TV. Her hands flutter from the remote to her hair to the gaudy brooch on her chest and her nerves make something panicked press just under my breastbone. Sensing my mood, Brian laces our fingers together and pulls me next to him on the couch. I see Sean notice how close we’re sitting and a silly part of me wonders what he’s thinking, and then I can’t believe I care, given the circumstances.

And suddenly, there’s George Holly’s classically beautiful face staring at us from the screen. His voice is such a lovely one that I’m almost happy he’s the one narrating these sorts of moments. He gives us all a short intro of what to expect tonight with a brief recap of everyone’s names and our parade entrances, and then he opens a thin envelope containing our fates.

The tributes from One score nines and tens, as usual. So do Nils and Esther. Three scores a seven and a six before Brian’s face is flashing on the screen with a ten next to it.

“Ten!” Tommy and Elizabeth spin each other in a small but enthusiastic dance. Elizabeth says, “Not bad at all, Brian!”

Next to me, Brian relaxes. He nudges my shoulder with his own, grinning, but I am suddenly so nervous I can’t quite breathe.

Onscreen, Holly says, “Kate Connolly…nine!”

I must have misheard him. There’s no way my knife throwing should’ve earned a nine; the highest I was hoping for was a seven.

They’re all congratulating each other now, pleased at having two tributes who’ve scored so high. Elizabeth’s saying something about how sponsors must be going mad for us both and Dory Maud says something about how they’ll have to set up some meetings tomorrow during lunch. Brian bumps my shoulder again.

“How about that, Katie-kat,” he says, but I’m watching the way Sean’s mouth tenses when the girl from Seven gets a ten. He scrawls something so hastily into his notebook that I wonder if it’s even legible.

“How about that,” I say.

Brian’s looking at me but not at me, like he’s seeing something foggy in the distance. Back home, when we’d night fish, all of the fisherman wear this face. It’s narrow and hopeful at the same time.

He says, “I hope they saw,” and I don’t have to ask to know he’s talking about his family.

“I do, too.”

____________________________________

 

**SEAN**

Today Dory Maud and I divide our morning between our two tributes in the hopes of getting them ready for their interviews with George Holly. He’s a fixture in the Games, the perennial announcer; he has a way of setting even the most tense tribute at ease, if they let him. I want my information on him to be true. He would be a valuable asset.

Puck bombards me with questions the moment we start training. How should she act for the audience? What if she has nothing positive to say? Does Holly hug everyone, or would she be able to get away with a handshake?

I help her as best I can. I’m still not sure how she got that nine, but I’m determined that she use it to her advantage in the interview.

A small, selfish part of me thinks about what that nine and Brian’s ten mean for me as mentor and me as myself. It cannot have escaped Malvern’s notice that both my tributes scored so high. The last thing I want is for him to instruct the Gamemakers to target them beyond their usual rotation when I already know Mutt Malvern will be doing all he can to set his tributes against them. But a crooked thing has begun to grow in that cracked spot where I broke my ribs in the arena, and I think it feels like hope.

Brian listens to all I have to say. I tell him volunteering for his brother in his very last year of eligibility, combined with his high training score and Tommy’s costume, has already set him off from the rest of the tributes. He seems more at ease at that.

I am not sure what else to tell them tonight. We have some time tomorrow to go over last minute strategy before the interviews, but they’re both too on edge to pay much attention to anything other than how to walk in high heels, in Puck’s case, and how to stop worrying shirt collars, in Brian’s.

They need to be steady for both the interviews and the arena. Dory Maud and I have a brief conversation through eyebrows and shoulder raises during lunch and we agree.

“You’ve got the rest of the day off,” I say. When I ask, Elizabeth passes me the butter dish.

Puck and Brian exchange incredulous glances before Brian says, “What’s that mean?”

“Hmm?”

“We have off today?” Puck’s expression looks nearly as grey as the harbor during storm season. “We should be training.”

Dory Maud says, “Sean and I agree that you should both try to relax somewhat. You practically wore a hole into the carpet this morning. You’re useless to yourselves in the arena if you’re stressed and unsettled.”

“Yes, wonder why we’d be stressed and unsettled,” Puck says, ripping her bread in half.

My voice is quiet when I speak. “We’ve both won before,” I say. “We’ve gotten victors home, before. You can trust us on this.”

“You have to,” Elizabeth says unhelpfully.

Puck and Brian share a look again, but this time Puck chews her lip and nods when Brian inclines his head. He says, “If you think that’s best.”

“We do,” Dory Maud says.

“Well.” Puck and Brian take hands again and again I have to stop myself from wondering if Brian lied to us before about loving her. They stand, and Puck says, “We’re going to the pool, then.”

I say, “Be safe,” and she raises her hand in acknowledgement just before the door slams shut.

Elizabeth is the first to break the silence. “Delightful girl.”

“They are preparing to die,” I say. “Manners aren’t a high concern at this stage.”

Dory Maud rubs circles into my back. I try not to think about how her hands are the same that held my father’s when he died. From the tears in her eyes, I think she is trying to do the same.

____________________________________

 

**PUCK**

Tommy brings us our outfits in shimmering green bags the next morning. I am grumpy still from yesterday’s lunch and sore from yesterday’s swim and Tommy recoils comically from me when he comes into my room.

“Someone slept poorly last night,” he says, singsong. His eyeliner is blue today.

I say, “I don’t know how to make them like me.”

I hadn’t realized I was worrying about that. Saying it eases my chest and tightens it all at once. Tommy kisses my forehead right where my eyebrows scrunch my face.

“No frowns today,” he says. “We’re going to make you shine so much they’ll have no choice but to like you.”

He leaves me to my prep team, and they make do on his promise. They give me thick, dark eyelashes that are cut in a stylized uneven way, and combined with the dark silver eyeshadow they dust over my eyelids, I look unearthly again. There’s still enough of me to be noticed — they’ve kept my hair ginger and curled down my back — but even my hair seems more of itself than usual. More ginger. They brush crushed pearls over my cheekbones and stand back to admire their work.

Tommy sweeps back in and says, “Lovely,” and kisses them all on the cheek. They bow out, looking pleased.

He puts his hands on his hips and scans me, muttering something I can’t quite make out. Then he turns abruptly, plucks something off the counter, and tosses something small and silvery at me. I barely catch it.

“Your token.” He points at my hand and the sight of my mother’s earring nearly makes me cry. It’s too much after everything.

I whisper, “Thanks.”

He looks off into the corner to give me time to pretend I’m not on the verge of sobbing all over their careful makeup. When I’m no longer pressing my fingers to the corners of my eyes, he turns to me and says, “Dress time. You ready?”

“I suppose.”

Tommy somehow gives me a look that conveys sympathy, sadness, and encouragement. He reminds just so softly of Gabe. Gabe perfected that look after we sent our parents off to sea for the last time.

I miss him opening the garment bag, but suddenly Tommy’s holding a silvery top and skirt. They look like the moon does in the harbor at night, all flowing and static at the same time. It feels like water on my skin. I look half swallowed by a myth.

 _Oh._ I don’t think I’d said it outloud, but Tommy beams as if I’d just ordered twenty of these outfits.

“One last thing,” he says. He sets another piece of netting over my hair. It’s silver this time, with glimmering seashells instead of pearls.

“You’ve outdone yourself,” I say. The skirt poofs out when I spin. “My mother always said you should look your best when you’re angry, so you’ll scare people.” I meet his eyes in the mirror. “I can work with this, I think.”

“Good.” Tommy touches up my hair with quick fingers. He appraises me again and says, “Well. I think you’re ready, Puck.”

____________

 

Sean and Dory Maud give us both a quick “good luck” before taking their seats in the audience. Brian, sharp in his green and silver suit, nudges me with his elbow. He’s radiant tonight.

“Alright, Katie-kat?”

I say, “Alright.” I slide my hand into the crook of his elbow. The Careers glare as us when we enter to prep room, staring, I think, at what it means for us to be here and to be so close. I’m thinking we should’ve asked our mentors about how best to weaponize our friendship, but I think Brian has the right idea when he kisses my hand before we take our seats onstage.

George Holly jogs happily onstage and waves to the crowd, who roar at his entrance, and just like that we’re broadcast live to all of Thisby.

Holly’s been the face of the Games for the past ten years. He’s very good at his job, a crowd favorite; he’s excellent at making tributes memorable and likable. It’s a horrible thought that this is the last time any of us will be smiling for the next however long, but it’s somewhat reassuring to know that Holly will make our five minutes remarkable some way or another.

Like always, we start in district order. I tune out both tributes from One — I’m sure Sean will yell at me for that later — but Esther, the girl from Two, makes my skin crawl when she recounts how many people she had to climb over in order to volunteer. I’m not sure how Holly manages to spin that into her simple determination to win. Seconds later, it seems, Nils has gone, and then the two from Three, and then it’s my turn.

My legs feel like seaweed. Holly takes my hand and kisses it, and from the way his eyebrows are raised I’m sure he’s going to ask about Brian.

“So, Kate,” Holly says familiarly. He leans forward in his chair. “You look a vision in this outfit. Doesn’t she, folks?” He addresses this last to the crowd, and we’re hit with a blast of noise as they shout their agreement.

I laugh a little breathlessly. “All thanks to Tommy,” I say, and the crowd claps again as the cameras finds him next to our mentors in the crowd. He waves the cameras back to me good naturedly.

“Yes, thanks to Tommy.” Holly tilts his head to the side. “But, Kate—”

“Puck.”

“—what about the other — I’m sorry?”

I push a curl behind my ear and hope they can’t see my hand shaking from nerves. I say, “I prefer Puck.” Holly seems to be hoping for a little extra, so I add, gesturing to the audience, “If we’re going to be friends, you should call me Puck.”

They laugh. I grin now. This is easier than I expected.

Holly gives a little laugh himself and slaps his knee. “We’re all friends here, Puck. There’s a story there.”

It’s odd how he asks that, a question but not. I’m not sure how much I want to tell him, because it’s a memory that my brothers are doubtless going to trip over when I say it.

“There’s a story,” I say, and the audience hushes to hear me. “Back home. It’s about a spirit who’d tangle nets and poke holes in boats and generally cause all sorts of havoc. Sort of a district myth I suppose. My brothers and I, our parents used to tell us about him whenever we’d be particularly lively.” I pause for a breath. “We’d call each other Pucks when someone dropped dishes or knotted someone’s hair. And, well.”

My throat chokes up before I finish but I have no need to. “And you were the most, ah, lively of your siblings?” Holly asks. It’s odd that I should feel grateful to him for rescuing me, but I am.

“Yes.” My voice is nearly a whisper. “It stuck.”

“Where are your parents now? I’d bet they’re so proud to have a daughter like you.”

I say, “They died. Four years ago.”

The crowd makes a collective sigh of sadness. Holly says, “I’m so sorry to hear that,” and I nearly believe him.

I need to not cry tonight. We have sponsors, surely; crying during interviews is not the way to keep them. I tell him, “I have my brothers. We’re fighters, all of us.”

“You surely are. May the odds be ever in your favor.” He motions for me to stand, and he takes my hand and raises it above our heads. “Puck Connolly, District Four!”

I have no time to be relieved that it’s over before Holly asks Brian about kissing my hand.

“Is there something there?” Holly asks. The cameras angled over the crowd catch him winking at Brian. “That was quite gallant of you, Brian.”

“She’s my best friend,” Brian says simply. The crowd goes, _ahh,_ the way the sea does when the tide runs in.

Holly doesn’t buy it. “You can tell us. Can’t he?” The crowd roars to punctuate his point.

“I liked her, once,” Brian admits. He forces a laugh and elbows Holly. “Before she told me she’d spit on my grave when I died.”

Holly gives an audible gasp. “No!” He twists in his seat to look at me. I shrug helplessly, and he turns back to Brian. “Not that lovely young woman we just had out here!”

“That’s right.” Brian leans back in his chair and smirks. “Born of vinegar, her parents said.”

“Good of you to tell us,” Holly says, shaking his head in amusement. Brian’s making that face he does when he wants so badly to bust out laughing but thinks it’s inappropriate for the situation. I roll my eyes, exaggerating for the cameras.

After the crowd has calmed, Holly moves into Brian volunteering for Jonathan. A line develops on Brian’s forehead.

“He’s my brother,” Brian says. His voice is so quiet. “I promised our parents when I was five that I’d look after him, always.”

“And you’ll go home, and you’ll keep that promise,” Holly says warmly. They stand. “Brian Carroll, District Four!”

I take his hand again when he reaches his seat, ignoring the fact that he had a crush on me. If it’s true, it would’ve been years ago. And I made a promise to myself that I’d keep him alive, and that’s more important than anything.

____________

 

That night I’m standing at one of the large living room windows and it’s Sean who walks in this time. I don’t turn when I hear him, instead knowing that he’ll stand beside me if he wants. When he does I lean on him, and he puts his arms around me. He says nothing when I wipe my eyes with his shirt.

My voice is swollen when I say, “Promise me.”

Sean doesn’t ask what I mean. I know he remembers.

“I promise,” he says.

I believe him.

____________________________________

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading this far! :) There will be a second chapter up hopefully in the next month; it took me ages to write this much, and the actual time in the arena will likely be hella longer.
> 
> A HUGE s/o to [the lovely Skatzaa](http://archiveofourown.org/users/skatzaa/pseuds/skatzaa), without whom there would be none of this <3 Mercedes has done a ton of amazing TSR fics [here](http://archiveofourown.org/users/skatzaa/pseuds/skatzaa/works?fandom_id=765832) if you wanna check them out :)
> 
> I'm on Tumblr! [Come say hi :)](http://ivecarvedawoodenheart.tumblr.com/)


	2. Part Two: The Arena

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: there's more violence in this section, as you may imagine. It's not *too* graphic, but we're in the arena now.

________________________

 

**THE ARENA**

________________________

 

**PUCK**

The morning swoops down on us as suddenly as if it were as anxious for the Games to start as I am for them to be stopped and bundled into a ball and tossed into the harbor the way Gabe did to that ratty blanket I wore around with me when I was six. The problem, though, is someone would raise a fuss and demand that whoever threw it into the harbor should also jump in and save it, and wash it, and also mend the corner that scraped against the poison rocks and subsequently disintegrated.

I’m not ready for the arena. Every time I think I am I see Brian and or touch my earring and think about how if he doesn’t make it home something of me will die, and how if I’m to keep something in my brothers from dying, Brian will have to stay in the arena without me.

Dory Maud shakes me out of these pleasant thoughts around seven. I have been awake for hours, but I put on a show of yawning and shoveling sausages onto my plate like I’ve had a decent night’s sleep. There’s a thin layer of sorrow blanketing the dining hall table this morning, dampening everyone; Elizabeth’s only response to me eating the sausages with my fingers is a little _hm!_

“Do you have a token, Brian,” Sean asks, in that same not question way that Holly used last night. Brian shakes his head. Sean considers his plate like he’s deciding something. “You can take mine, if you’d like.”

A sudden flash of suspicion runs through me at this. The manipulative power of this gesture, of a tribute wearing a victor’s token in the arena, is so immense that I think for a moment Sean and Dory Maud are casting me off. Then Sean meets my eyes levelly, tracing a little X over his heart when the others aren’t looking, and I feel so low that I avert my gaze. He’s already starting to fulfill his promise to me.

Brian says, “Are you sure,” and Sean doesn’t let him finish his question before pinning the horse pin to his shirt.

“Thank you,” Brian says. He fingers the pin with awe screaming from his face.

 _Thank you,_ I mouth, and when Sean raises his glass I can’t stop myself from thinking he’s toasting my funeral.

____________

 

Elizabeth is unexpectedly tearful when our plates are cleared away. She pulls me and Brian for a hug and says, “Good luck,” and it sounds as though she truly means it. She’s wiping something from her eyes when she lets us go.

“Thank you,” I say.

Brian adds, “For everything,” and tears stream down her face. She puts a hand on each of our cheeks and pulls us in for another hug and I think, for a moment, that she’s sobbing for us. Then she lets us go and hurries back into her rooms. It’s hard not to wonder if I’ll see her again.

It is only the four of us now. Tommy will meet one of us at the stockyard, where they’ll prep us for launch; I’m not sure who’s going to help the other get ready.

The moment is thin and swollen so as to nearly burst. It’s a lot of us just looking at each other. I think of our mentors and the years’ experience they have between us, and when Dory Maud rests her forehead against mine, I can believe we will get Brian out of this alive.

“Be safe,” Dory Maud whispers to me now. I wait for the joke, the acknowledgement that no one is safe in the Games, but it doesn’t come. She presses a kiss to my hairline and lets go.

Sean stands before me now. To my surprise, he’s smiling in that way he has, just enough to show he knows how to do it. He says, “I’ll say goodbye later. I’m seeing you off.”

I nod at this. He reached out for my face and I startle, but he only knocks two fingers under my chin.

“Head up, Puck,” he says. My name is soft in his voice.

Brian says my name now and I’m crying all at once against his chest. He holds me steady as ever.

“We’ll be okay, Katie-kat.” He repeats himself until I let myself believe him, just for long enough that it settles me. I can’t afford to go into the arena with tear-puffed eyes.

Four Peacekeepers come into the room and split so that two are escorting me and Sean and two are escorting Brian.

I tell Brian, “Say thank you to Tommy for me,” and I try to memorize the smile he gives me.

“I will,” he says. “See you in the arena.”

____________

 

Sean hands me a silver-blue bodysuit and when I take it, letting it spill in my hands like water, I realize even if I make it out alive there’s no way I’ll be able to associate the color with anything other than the Games. My dresses to the carpets to this. These Games will be forever stained silver-blue.

“What do you think,” I ask. I can’t raise my intonation enough to properly sound out the question.

He doesn’t answer right away, instead rubbing the fabric between his finger and thumb and smelling it. Then he says, “It’s thin. Breathable. Heat will leave easily, make sure you have something to trap it in. They usually have sleeping bags at the Cornucopia. Sweat should evaporate quickly too.”

I jerk my head in a nod and pull my hair up with shaking fingers. Sean stops my hands and takes their place, gently tying my hair with an elastic. For some reason this makes me want to cry. This is an unexpected kindness he’s shown me.

“Don’t cry,” Sean says. He’s scanning my face the way he’d looked at the tributes at the parade, like there’s a secret written between my freckles that he wants to tease out.

“It’s going to be awful, won’t it?”

Sean tilts his head to the side. “Do you know what I thought when Elizabeth pulled your names? I saw the way you held yourself, and I thought, this could be the year we have our first female victor in nearly two decades.”

He says it matter-of-fact in the sort of way that requires no response from me, which I appreciate because I think I have swallowed all the words I know.

The clock on the wall reads thirty minutes to launch, then twenty, then ten. I drink from a canteen and pray Brian, Padgett, and I can find a water supply somewhere quick. The three of us should have an advantage over the Career pack, too; we are a small group, and our combined chances of survival are so small that the odds of us having to turn on each other is rather slim. Whereas, if I were One, Two, or Seven, I would be very paranoid about whoever sets their bedding up next to mine.

“Five minutes,” a mechanical voice says from somewhere. A metal plate large enough for me to stand on rises out of the middle of the floor, bounded by a tube that goes all the way up to the high ceiling and beyond.

My heart is pounding so fast that I think Sean can hear it. We make eye contact, and I down the rest of the canteen while he smooths the neck of my bodysuit.

“I have something,” he says, “if you want it.”

I narrow my eyes, confused. “What?”

He clears his throat, digging around in his ancient jacket. He pulls out a red ribbon I recognize.

I say, “From the festival?” He nods.

Every year we hold a festival in Four to celebrate the sea harvest of the year before. District Four merges with the sea almost, with all the blue in the market square. There’s a tradition amongst the younger kids to search for a red ribbon tied to a shell among all the blue scattered everywhere, and the one who finds it is guaranteed a wish. It’s the only night where everyone is guaranteed to be fed. Palsson gives out delicious, honey-soaked pastries that melt in your mouth, and my brothers and I have contests to see who can eat the most.

“I know you have a token,” Sean’s telling me now, “but the Gamemakers won’t have to know this is another.”

He reaches up to tie it around the elastic holding my hair in place. “For luck,” he says.

I am so overwhelmed that all I can do is is touch the ends of the ribbon with shaking hands. From the way his eyes crinkle, I think he understands my thanks.

“One minute,” the mechanical voice says.

My pulse surges so high that I worry I’ll pass out on my pedestal and be blown up.

I stand on my plate, my legs shaking. Sean looks me over again to make sure everything’s in its place. I take his hand, just quickly enough for him to lace our fingers together.

“Thirty seconds.”

“Sean,” I say. He squeezes my fingers gently to say he’s listening. I open my mouth to ask him to remember about Brian but the words don’t come.

He says, soft, “Good luck, Puck Connolly.”

There’s nothing else to say. I let go of his hand as the tube seals around me, and I am lifted into the arena.

____________

 

I can’t see.

I don’t know what I’m looking at but it’s blinded me and I can’t see.

 _Calm down._ I tell myself to take measured breaths, to close my eyes against the light. When my breathing settles I still have forty of my sixty seconds to figure out where exactly I am.

I’m standing about fifteen feet away from the girl from Eight on my right side and the boy from Five on my left. We’re in a sandy clearing facing the Cornucopia; tall palm trees encircle us, but I can hear the _shh shh_ that promises a large body of water nearby, and this is our first bit of luck. Brian and I can catch anything in the water.

Thirty seconds. There’s a little backpack by my feet that looks promising, but what I really need are knives.

Twenty. I search the path to the Cornucopia and — there! A Capitol set of wicked-looking knives in a cloth case, not fifty yards away.

Fifteen seconds, and I haven’t found Brian or Padgett yet. With any luck, once the gong goes off, they won’t get caught in the fighting; Padgett’s not very big and Brian’s lungs are bad enough at the best of times and I don’t want to consider what it would feel for either of their cannons to go off now.

I see Brian just beyond the tail of the Cornucopia with eight seconds left. I jerk my head toward the treeline behind him, hoping he’ll understand that I mean for him to run and wait for me to find him.

The gong sounds.

The boy from Five slips and falls on the sand and I realize what an advantage that is, that we grew up running on beaches. I swept up my little backpack and am closing in on the knives when a shadow on my right plows into my side, sending me flat on my side as the girl from Eight wrestles me for my backpack.

“No —”

I wrench it from her grip, dimly aware of shouting going on all around me. She’s hot on my heels when I grab my first knife and it embeds itself in her neck.

I snatch up my other knives and make for the treeline I pointed Brian toward and hope on everything I hold dear that he’s made it. I dodge around another skirmish between the boys from Nine and Twelve and am in the blessed shade of the palm trees, yards and yards away from the nearest fight, when I see Padgett’s sandy yellow hair.

He is so, so small facing off against the boy from Five. I’m running toward him not half a second after I spot him, but I blink and suddenly there’s a gleaming trident in Five’s chest.

“Brian!”

He pulls the trident from the boy’s chest and the three of us are running as fast as we can, Brian setting the pace and me in back. The trees look like they go on forever and I focus on not tripping to avoid the blood that already stains all of our bodysuits.

Brian stops short after we’ve been running five minutes. I nearly run into Padgett, but I see what’s made him pause.

We’re on an island.

____________________________________

 

**SEAN**

Dory Maud and I have a system for the Games built from having officially mentored together for four years. The first day we both sit in the Games Headquarters with the other mentors, watching and analyzing the other tributes’ strengths and weaknesses. She calls out details to me and I write them in my book, and it settles us, having information we can hold.

The twenty-four mentors share the main TV and have individual split screens that follow both their tributes. Dory Maud and I watch Brian and Puck on our screens, from their initial survey of the arena to grabbing weapons to using them. I cross out Bev from Eight and Martin from Five.

“There’s Six, too,” Dory Maud says. Her mouth is a firm line as she analyzes the largest screen. “The girl. And the boy from Twelve, and both from Three.”

Padgett’s mentor, Ian Privett, is a victor around Dory Maud’s age, but grey before his time. We’ve met but I’ve never worked with him before. He’s tallish and angular like most from Six, as if the hours of looking over train and car parts left him with edges impossible to sand down.

I have rarely heard him speak, but he does now. “She was the second of her siblings to be reaped.”

“That’s awful,” Dory Maud says softly. Ian Privett just hitches his shoulders in a shrug that says he’s too weary for words.

I cross off their names and try not to think of any of the tributes’ families. It’s best to remember everyone in the arena as human, I’d told Puck, but it is not easiest to. There are too many heartaches waiting in this arena.

I say, “That’s a fourth already,” and now Puck and Brian have reached the edge of the arena.

I’m on my feet and in front of the TV in an instant, scanning the screen as best I can. That can’t possibly be all of the arena; the island is about as large as the natatorium in the Training Center. They’re never this small.

There’s a green blotch in the background of Puck’s perspective and I think, maybe, that this is just interference when the screen changes to a tribute swimming in the water. We watch him swim until he’s running awkwardly in the surf and stumbling onto a beach that’s different than the one the Cornucopia rests upon.

Then the camera switches to capture an aerial view and I gasp, a hollow little sound that I didn’t know I could make. Behind me, I hear Ian mutter something that sounds like a curse.

It’s not one island. It’s many. They’ve never done this before.

I feel, suddenly, much more uneasy than usual.

“That’s new,” Dory Maud comments. Because I know her and I know that crease that rests between her eyebrows, I know that she’s as worried as I am. The knowledge is not reassuring.

On our split screens Padgett points toward the blotch of green. Puck and Brian consider him without talking, and I want to yell at them to consider whatever might swim below them.

I’m beyond thankful when Brian says as much. “We don’t know—”

There’s a shuffling from behind them, a noise that says the fighting is making its way toward them, and Puck grabs Padgett and Brian both and drags them into the water.

____________________________________

 

**PUCK**

I don’t give us time to worry about whether Brian was right about the mutts. The Gamemakers don’t typically pull out any tricks this soon, this arena seems designed to force us into the water, and the close sound of an axe whizzing through the air are all compelling enough for me to make up my mind.

“Come on!”

Padgett takes off as quick as he can and I spare a moment to consider how best to teach him his strokes as he doggy paddles toward the island. Brian slows his pace to match. I swim on my back, confident I’ll be able to tell if we’re being pursued, and I feel rather than see Brian scanning for threats ahead of us. It’s a struggle for both of us to swim with our weapons, but I can’t help hoping that the others are having just as bad a time as we are. If not more so.

I don’t know how long we swim before reaching Padgett’s island but Brian’s lungs are giving him some trouble. He climbs out of the waves with difficulty and collapses on his back, Padgett looking small and slight next to him. I allow us a minute to recover, counting the seconds aloud; we need to figure out if someone else is here before we can fully relax. I go through Sean and Dory Maud’s list of things to find while we force air back into our lungs.

Our minute’s up. I say, “We need to search the island.”

“Want to walk the beach and move inward?” Padgett asks. He tosses a sand clump into the water and frowns at it.

Brian says, “Sounds good,” and I nod. I give Padgett one of my knives, arm myself, and adjust my backpack. Later we’ll have to go through it as well and see if it’s any use. With any luck, we’ll have a water bottle or two. This body of water is a promising water supply, but we’ll have to boil it clean, because the taste in my mouth tells me it’s salt water.

Six cannons sound. We take stock of each other and keep walking.

None of us say much of anything other than _there’s another island over there, it’s getting hotter now, now the sun’s going down._ We find a shallow pool near to the center of the island that must be spring fed, because there’s no stream leading in or flowing out. Brian gets his finger wet and tastes it hesitantly, then shakes his head. Salt water still. I force myself to remember where the spring sits in relation to the rest of the island, and we keep walking.

A few birdlike things that I don’t know the name for scuttle across our path, but they’re fat and have the potential of a good meal seasoned with some salt. I throw my knife at one and Padgett stabs another and we have two for dinner. We wrap palm leaves around them as best we can to keep from leaving a blood trail.

All at once I’m seeing the girl from Eight, my knife in her neck. She may have had brothers back home, too.

Brian wordlessly takes my hand and I am so grateful for someone to hold onto. The prongs of his trident are still, very faintly now from the water, but still rusty red all the same.

____________

 

It’s nearing dusk when Padgett points and says, “There.”

He’s heading toward an improbable rock outcrop rising from the center of the island. Its base is hidden by the same sort of flowering trees we have along the outskirts of our district, the kind that grow below the mountains. I’ve only seen them once with my mother.

It’ll make a fair campsite for tonight. Good cover should we risk a fire, solid protection at our backs. It’s much better than sleeping beside that spring we found earlier.

Brian walks around the rocks as quietly as he can while Padgett and I go through my backpack. There’s a jacket that seems to be designed the opposite of our bodysuits, because when I put it on it reflects my body heat back to me; a water bottle, as I’d hoped, except totally empty; a cardboard carton of iodine tablets; and some pain reducing pills, according to their packaging. Barring water, I’d been hoping for food — we haven’t found much else other than these bird things, and a fire every time we catch some will get us killed. There is some fruit hanging off these plants, but it’s not light enough to properly identify them.

Brian comes back with an armload of vines from the other side of the rocks. “Help with this?” he asks, prodding me with his foot. Padgett watches us, his mouth small.

“You too,” I tell him. He looks like Finn when his face is like that, and I touch my earring. “Your hands are smaller than mine.” He smiles a little at that.

Brian talks him through how to weave a net, explaining how best to use the tree branches around us as part of his loom. Under his instruction, Padgett soon has a few rows of knots done.

I alternate between watching them for a few seconds to scanning the trees with my bag of knives in my hands. I pull on the jacket after about thirty minutes, once the sun has well and truly fallen. Sean was right about our outfits. I’m shivering even with tree cover and the jacket doing its best to warm me up.

There’s a fanfare suddenly. Brian and Padgett quickly but carefully step back from the vines and the three of us wait for the pictures of the dead to brighten the night sky.

They skip directly to District Three. I frown; I’d been hoping someone would’ve taken out Esther or Nils. No one from Four, of course. Then it’s the boy from Five, the girl from Six, the girl from Eight, and the boy from Twelve. Six dead in the first twenty-four hours.

Padgett rubs his eyes and I wonder about it before realizing. The girl from Six.

“I’m sorry,” I tell him, softly. I reach for his hand slowly, so he has time to see and decide whether he wants to accept.

He wipes his nose on his sleeve. “It’s okay. I didn’t know her well, anyhow.”

I think he’s going to ignore my hand, but he surprises me by burrowing against my side.

“What was her name?” Brian asks, because sometimes the awful questions must be asked in order to let them be.

“Alice,” Padgett says to my ribs. Brian rubs his back and I can only hold him while he cries.

____________

 

Brian wakes me for my turn at watch a few hours before the sun should rise.

“You should’ve woken me earlier,” I say, but my annoyance is lost in my yawn.

He nods at where Padgett’s still sleeping on me. “He deserves some sleep.”

This makes me uncomfortable and a little nervous in a way that hurts to admit. Brian’s talking like Padgett’s Jonathan, like he should sacrifice himself for our ally. I don’t know how to remind him that if he’s to win, Padgett can’t.

Brian looks at me like he knows what I’m thinking and can’t believe it of me. “Just tonight,” he says. “Tomorrow we’ll set up a normal rotation.”

“Okay,” I say. I don’t want to spend the rest of our short lives arguing with him.

“Okay,” Brian repeats, and he reaches out. I draw back on instinct, confused, but he just pulls on one end of my ribbon. I forgot I was wearing it. “From the festival?”

I nod.

“How?” I poke his pin in response. “Ah,” he says. “Sean.”

There is no time to analyze why he says Sean’s name the way he does. I think, maybe, that he’s seeing my ribbon as a sign of whatever promise the two of them must have made, but Brian will be useless to me and Padgett with no sleep and he’s looking ready to make another argument why I should survive this instead of him. There is no time and we have both killed someone today and what I need is for him to sleep.

“Yes, Sean.” I ease Padgett’s head off my leg and rest him on Brian’s. “Go to sleep, Brian.”

He leans back against the rocks without arguing. I let myself think about this possibility, of Sean having promised us both the other would live. He doesn’t strike me as someone who would lie and especially not with both of us heading off to our deaths. The only thing that makes sense is if he’s reckoned with himself in a sentimental way, told himself something fanciful about how if one of us lives the other will live on in memory. I laugh without sound at this. Sean Kendrick being sentimental is the least likely scenario.

He must have lied. The only other option would be that he and Dory Maud were planning to get us both out, and that’s impossible.

Brian snores in that way he has, that sounds less like thunder and more like the dying motor of my family’s boat. I worried about this the first time he stayed the night at our house, but now it’s a comfort. Padgett spreads out so he’s lying half on both of us and this is a comfort too, that he trusts us enough to sleep so soundly. I remember what I thought earlier, how Padgett will have to die if Brian is to win, and I so profoundly do not deserve this trust from him.

I swear to myself that I will not be the one to kill him. He snuffles in his sleep like he’s still crying for Alice, and I play with his light hair the way my mother used to do when we were sick. Padgett stills, the tension in his forehead clearing.

I do not want to think about what it would do to my heart if it is my knife that stops his heart.

____________________________________

 

**SEAN**

Dory Maud says, “That’s the first day done,” and she yawns so loudly that the other mentors look over at us. She goes off to the refreshments in the middle of the room with a promise to bring back a tray of the caramels she’s convinced she can get me to like.

“Is she always this,” Ian says. I think he’s pausing to decide on a word, but he does not continue speaking.

“She cares,” I tell him, my voice quiet. “It’s easier, sometimes, to pretend not to. I’m sure you know that as well as any of us.”

He does not say anything in response. We watch Puck clean her knives, even though there’s no need, and she’s weaving a net when the island starts sinking.

_“Wake up! Right now!”_

She shakes Brian and Padgett awake and they must realize what’s happening right away because their eyes are very round as they shove nets and vines into the backpack. Puck snatches up the pack and shoves the knives at Padgett, likely realizing it’d be too much to swim with both as the pack is so full, and Brian holds his trident as a last-minute defense tactic as they sprint for the beach.

The rock outcrop starts to crumble before our eyes. A giant stone nearly flattens all three of them. I am finding it suddenly hard to breathe.

The entire screen is shaking. They’re on the main TV now, as expected; the other mentors have crowded around it to take notes. Lucky for them to have a preview of the fun before it happens to their own tributes.

Dory Maud hugs her arms tight to her chest as Puck ducks another falling rock.

Except—

The next rock that falls should have been unable to reach them at all at that distance. They’re nearly at the beach now, according to the aerial footage. The rock outcrop was as near the beach as we are to District Four right now.

It looks like it’s been flung from the outcrop by some sort of launcher. Another rock splashes down in front of them. Brian pushes Puck and Padgett in front of him in an attempt to get them into the water, but then our screen’s covered with boulders and Dory Maud’s shouting obscenities at the Gamemakers and we can’t see any of them anymore.

I listen hard for cannons, search desperately for any indication that they’re swimming for another island. That they aren’t pinned by a boulder or the suction created by the sinking island. I find nothing.

We stand in front of the screens for a long, long time.

____________

 

After ten minutes we still can’t see anything. Our screens are blue-black.

“I’m going,” I say for the umpteenth time. Dory Maud opens her mouth to argue, but I talk over her. “No, Dory, I have to go—”

“Listen to her, boy,” Ian says. “We all know your, ah, relationship with Mutt Malvern.”

Dory Maud takes advantage of my silence and says, “You _cannot_ barge into the Control Room, Sean Kendrick. Especially not this year.”

“If you have other suggestions,” I say, my voice soft the way the sea is before a tidal wave. “I am happy to hear them.”

Neither of them say anything. I jerk my head in a nod and turn to go.

“Sean.” Dory Maud stands, stretches. “Hold up.”

I raise my eyebrow at her, waiting. She rolls her eyes.

She says, “I promised your father I’d keep you from getting killed, didn’t I?”

“So you tell me.” But I say it in a way that means _thank you._

____________

 

The Gamemaker Control Room is a large, pristine room that’s painted a white that seems to shimmer in the light. It’s guarded by Peacekeepers of course, but we pass them without incident. I have a suspicion that they’re curious to hear how well Mutt will take seeing me in his new environment, but I can hardly blame them.

There are rows upon tiered rows of white coated Gamemakers staring at screens mounted in the tables before them. Each of them has a stylus, a notebook, and a keyboard at their stations. The more important of them are at the very bottom of the tiers, sitting around a table that projects a huge digitized map of the arena. It takes several seconds before I find the island our tributes had found. It’s blinking a soft red.

“You can’t be here.”

I shove our screens at the Gamemaker nearest me. He stares up at me through long, purple curls, but he takes them from my hands. “I need these fixed,” I tell him. “It’s been fifteen minutes. None of your people out there can do anything for them.”

“Please,” Dory Maud adds. She elbows me.

“Please.”

The man runs his fingers over the back of one of the devices and peels up what looks to be a battery backing. While he goes through his checks I search the room as casually as I can. I want to be ready when Malvern’s son arrives.

A woman in green sits in front of the map and taps something, and a quarter of the arena lights up red. I am running down the steps toward her before Dory Maud can say my name.

Her voice echoes around the room as I call out, “What did that do?”

A Gamemaker behind me calls for the Peacekeepers. I ignore them except to relax my hands so as to appear non-threatening. I have found that most in the Capitol see me either as a piece to be bought, as an expert of the Games, or like I’m going to hurl knives at them. They should know I’m unarmed — this is standard Capitol protocol, especially for victors — but they stare like I’m rabid.

Two Peacekeepers touch me lightly with batons that I know will turn electric at the press of a button, should they wish it. I repeat myself. “What did that do?”

The woman in green meets my stare. “Sean Kendrick,” she says, and my name on her tongue is like a pebble in the sea. “Surely you have tributes to be concerned with.”

It bothers me that she should know me and I don’t know her name. I say, “I’m sorry to interrupt you, Gamemaker,” and I am thankful these Peacekeepers at my back cannot tell my pulse is running away from me.

“You don’t know me?” she asks, clearly amused. “I thought our mutual friend would have mentioned me.”

The way she lingers on _mutual friend_ tells me she means either President Malvern or Mutt and neither is reassuring.

“It’s as I said, Epona.” My hands fist without my consent at this new voice. Mutt Malvern descends the staircase across from me, puffing up like bird eager to show off his new feathers. He’s wearing the black and white that, like Epona’s green coat, must mark him as a Head Gamemaker. They must have changed the colors this year; last year, Epona’s coat would have meant she was a medic.

He stands behind Epona and folds his arms, smirking at me like he did the second year we were mentors together. This is the same face he gave me after his tribute cut mine open.

“It’s as I said,” Mutt repeats. “He’s not the brightest victor we’ve had. Only the youngest.”

Epona raises a hand to stop him from saying anything else. He shuts up immediately, which eases my heart rate somewhat. “What is it you came here for, Sean Kendrick?”

“Our screens aren’t working,” I tell her. The way she stares tells me this is too small a thing for me to bother her about, so I add, “Our tributes are in danger, and we haven’t been able to send them any aid they may require.”

“How long has this outage lasted?”

Dory Maud calls, “Twenty minutes, now.”

Epona waves for the Gamemaker working on our screens to come down to see her. While they analyze the data, Mutt Malvern circles the table leisurely, arms held out to call attention to his coat and the bracelets on his wrists.

“Lovely, sir,” I say, without thinking.

Something hot and angry flashes in his eyes, but he tempers it. “You’re envious,” he says, “and don’t try to deny it. Father told me you wanted my position.”

“You wear it better than I would.”

This placates him somewhat. “First intelligent thing you’ve said, Kendrick.”

We say nothing else to each other and I am grateful for it. I do not have the time to defuse his provocations for long.

Epona calls Mutt to her with a snap of her fingers and hands him our screens. He watches one as he stalks toward me, his face pretending worry and surprise.

“Uh oh,” he says. “Better keep a closer eye on them next time.”

My heartbeat crashes in my ears. “Hand it over. Please.”

“She’s nothing much to look at, is she,” he continues, tilting the screen to the side. He looks at me now. “Not with this axe in her leg, anyway.”

Now he throws the screens to me and I catch them and then I am running out of the room to see our sponsors. Dory Maud shouts behind me, and I yell at her to follow.

She catches up to me when we reach the Games Headquarters. Ian stumbles out of an armchair at the expressions on our faces.

“What’s happened?” Dory Maud demands.

I shove the screens at her and Ian as I dial Annie’s number. I turn away from them, desperate to hide my face as they gasp over the gash tearing Puck’s thigh.

____________________________________

 

**PUCK**

Padgett yells at me to leave the axe in place but it aches so badly that I can’t help thinking taking it out would help. He frantically cuts off the sleeves of his bodysuit and ties one around my thigh. Then he stumbles back to the stream, leaving me with nothing to do but stare dumbly at this axe sticking out of my right leg.

I try to think about that complicated card game Finn likes as a distraction, but my mind’s too aware of the trick for it to work. It can’t seem to forget how the girl from Seven and the Careers appeared to be waiting for us on this new island, and the one time I manage to think of something else, it is whether or not Brian survived the rockfall.

I won’t let myself think about him dying, so it’s back to the axe.

I lean my back against a knot in this fallen tree in order to focus. We need to stock up on food. We lost one bird in the swim away from the rockfall, and then lost the other in the tidal wave that swept us away from the Careers. I’m not sure how far the wave spread, but it likely went the length of the arena; they usually vary in size one year to the next, but even with the multiple islands this is one of the smaller ones I’ve seen. A wave that strong would have no problem covering all of it.

It was too loud to hear a cannon but the odds are high that someone got caught up in it. And then I feel so guilty, wishing that on any of them; drowning deaths are not pretty. And yet. I can’t help but wish someone’s cannon went off.

Plant leaves whisper-hiss as someone pushes through them, and I have a knife in both hands before Padgett limps out of the bushes. He’s tied his other sleeve at the bottom and it’s inflated like a child’s flotation device. I’m wondering how this is before spotting water leaking out of the knot.

I’m all at once aware of how dry my throat is. I concentrate on this to ignore the throbbing in my leg.

“Here,” Padgett whispers, handing the sleeve to me. “I put in the iodine. It should be good now.”

I shake my head. “You first,” I say. “Only fair.”

I search between the trees around us to make sure no one’s near while he drinks. He passes the sleeve to me after a moment, and my first gulp tastes so much better than anything I’ve ever drank before.

“We should have a parachute by now,” he says. He glances at my leg, and I look too. The size of the bloodstain on the fabric makes me wish I hadn’t.

I say, “Maybe they’re busy.”

Brian, if he were here, would shake his head and laugh grudgingly at that. Padgett’s frown just deepens.

“We’re their job,” he says. “Thisby will make their lives miserable if you die from this.”

It would be almost funny how quickly the parachute appears after he says this if my leg didn’t feel like a smoldering fire. Padgett rips it open immediately, sending a spool of thick thread tumbling onto my lap. He carefully eases the tip of the thread through the eye of a needle that looks sharper than my knives.

I turn my attention to the rest of the kit while he steels himself to sew me up. It also has bandages, tablets to prevent infection, and a special cream that says it’ll reduce swelling. I was hoping for some anaesthetic too, but all things considered, this is a well-stocked and well-needed gift.

“Ready?” Padgett asks grimly.

I nod in response and my left leg shakes the way Sean said it had on reaping day. Padgett eases the axe out and I scream until blackness pulls me under.

____________

 

Rain falls soft on my face. My eyes squeeze tighter, desperate to fall back asleep, but I twist the wrong way and my right leg protests hotly. I swallow another shriek. I open my eyes.

Padgett adjusts an intricate weaving of leaves above our heads. The rain now lands a few inches to my right. He says, “How’s it feeling?”

I don’t want to think about it yet. “How long was I asleep?”

“It’s been a day at least,” he says. “Only one anthem. It’s the girls from One and Ten and both from Eleven. Brian’s still alive.”

“Fourteen left,” I say.

“Fourteen left,” he agrees. “I caught us a bird while you were out,” he adds, handing me a meaty drumstick. I hadn’t recognized my headache until I smelled the meat.

“Thanks.” Padgett knocks my shoulder with his in response and I miss Brian so much that it hurts worse than my leg.

I eat quickly, newly worried about the state of things. I wipe the grease from the bird on my jumpsuit as best I can and ease apart the torn fabric where the axe landed.

The bird immediately threatens a reappearance. My skin is held together with jagged stitches that stretch across the wound, and there’s a bruise the size of my hand threatening to spread down the entirety of my thigh. I can only hope the salt water from the tidal wave helped clean the inside of the wound, because otherwise we’ve just stitched bacteria into a nicely warmed environment.

Padgett hands me the anti-swelling cream before I ask and I spread it as gently as I can. Even this whisper of pressure makes my eyes tear up. I don’t know how I’m going to help Padgett survive this arena. He looks like he’s thinking this too, but he doesn’t say it.

“Thanks for this,” I tell him now. He’s still frowning, but it lessens somewhat. “I won’t be able to sleep for awhile, if you want to get some rest.”

He curls up and is out so quickly that I’m surprised he managed to stay awake the whole day. I owe him a debt.

This should make me uneasy, but too much has happened so far for it to do much more than pull at something under my ribs. It is day three and ten of us are dead.

____________

 

It’s been quiet all morning. Padgett wakes up around noon and helps me stand and we are both eager to see if there are any others on our island. Neither of us says it, but Brian should know we’re both alive by now.

This island is similar to the first one we swam to. It has the same animal life — we pass a flock of the same birdlike things around one — and the same rocky foundation the further inland we go. At the center though, unlike that rock outcrop, is a towering mountain that we should have been able to spot from the beach. A thin curving trail of smoke rises out its top.

“A volcano,” I say, remembering Dory Maud’s arena from that day on the train. “Not ideal.”

He considers this. “Not necessarily,” he says slowly. I stare at him. “It’d be a good lookout point, don’t you think?”

“Not if it blows while we’re climbing,” I say, shaking my head. “We both know I wouldn’t be able to outrun lava.”

Padgett concedes my point and we keep walking. Now and then he comments something about wishing he could climb trees to see better, or that these palm trees are difficult to look between, or how if the tidal wave strikes again we should make for high ground. My leg hurts too much for me to be properly annoyed with him. He reminds me of Gabe when he was younger. Gabe used to do this when he wanted to be the one to drive the boat.

After an hour of this I make us stop and drink water from the sleeve and water bottle. We’re moving slow because of my leg, but the arena’s warming up. We can’t afford to dehydrate.

Padgett keeps staring at the smoke trail.

“Fine,” I tell him. I wait for him to set the sleeve down, and when he does I say, “Let’s climb the volcano.”

____________

 

It’s rough going. I don’t think I’ve walked this long uphill ever; District Four is bordered by mountains, but they’ve been enhanced like those rocks in the harbor. Someone in my year at school snuck off one night — to escape, we think — and he turned up unrecognizably charred. It was a good deterrent. Gabe still thinks it was a ruse from the Capitol, but none of us want to risk it.

Padgett makes us stop after a few hours for water and a bit more bird and to check my injury. I slather on another coat of the anti-swelling cream and use a bit of my sleeve to cover the stitches, and the low angle of the sun makes me want to have something solid at my back before nightfall.

“Shelter?” I ask, and he nods an agreement.

After about a half hour, Padgett jerks his head toward an alcove made from leaves. I ease myself gently to the ground, pushing down the memories of my mother’s failed attempts at this very thing in our garden at home, and stretch out as best I can.

We argue briefly about who should take first watch but Padgett eventually agrees that he deserves to sleep. I feel moderately guilty that I’m so burdensome at the moment, but with any luck I’ll either be feeling better, or be dead so it won’t matter, or Padgett will be dead and my injuries can’t slow him down. Thinking this way should be concerning, but I cling to it; I am not technically incorrect.

Padgett shuffles close to me. I run my fingers through his hair as gently as I can.

While he sleeps I go through our remaining supplies. The med kit, still with some thread left; the anti-swelling cream; my knives and their case, with two empty slots; the water bottle and the sleeve, both in need of refilling; my ribbon still, which can be used to carry some of our goods; and a few iodine tablets. Padgett sniffles and shivers a little in his sleep and I spare a moment to curse the wave that carried off the heat reflecting jacket. I rub his arms as best I can while still looking out.

He’s just stopped shaking when the cannon goes off.

____________________________________

 

**SEAN**

Dory Maud shakes me awake and it is the fact that she isn’t bothering to be gentle that tells me there’s a problem. She is usually kinder than this when it comes to waking me up, knowing as she does that sleep is a gift the arena still does not give lightly.

She’s holding Brian’s screen, but they don’t work outside of the Games Headquarters; this is another tool the Gamemakers use to make sure we mentors stay where we’re meant to be. They tend to like having us in the same area.

“What is it?” I ask. I’m going through scenarios in my mind and most of them center around Brian being dismembered the same way Mary was in my Game. He can’t have died, though; there’s an alert that turns the lights on in our rooms if our tribute dies, and as we have technically divided Brian and Puck between ourselves and Brian is my tribute, my awakening would have been much worse than Dory Maud bursting in.

Then I remember the tampering our screens went through when the rockslide happened and images of Brian dead flood my mind again.

Dory Maud hasn’t said anything, just drawn back from me to catch her breath. I sit upright and slide out of bed and search for my shoes. I’ve just finished pulling them on when she tells me.

“Brian’s under attack.”

____________

 

Ian Privett hands me a plate piled high with fried eggs and bacon but the thought of eating while Brian fights seizes my stomach. I set the plate down.

Dory Maud hadn’t been exactly truthful when she’d woken me up. Brian’s not in a fight yet, she told me in the hallway leading to the mentors’ room, but the boy from Eight is climbing up to the top of Brian’s island and they’ll likely be fighting soon.

I hate this part of mentoring just slightly less than when I have to return to Four and talk about a parent’s dead child. We are here to protect them as best we can; watching other tributes approach while knowing we can’t physically stop it makes me powerless in a way that I’ve never wanted to be.

The Gamemakers seem to be expecting this fight to be particularly bloody. The main TV tracks Eight’s progress up the mountain, sporadically shifting to Brian to emphasize how unprepared he is. It seems designed especially to remind me of the bet I made with Malvern.

Eight climbs over the ridge of the mountain and the last thing I think before Brian buries his trident in the boy’s chest is that I can’t remember his name.

____________

 

We watch Brian clean his trident with a large leaf nearby as he waits for the helicarriers to remove Eight’s body. He set the boy’s backpack at his feet, likely intent on going through it once he’s gone.

“Reminds me of your dad,” Ian Privett says neutrally. I don’t look at him, but he takes my silence as an invitation to keep talking. “My first mentor year he killed my tribute just like that.”

I say, “I’m sorry.” Dory Maud reaches for my hand and I link our fingers together.

Ian glances at our hands before searching my face. I wonder how much of my father he sees in me, but I say nothing.

“Is what it is, now,” he tells me. Then he turns toward Dory Maud. “That was your year,” he says, his voice tired.

“It was,” she says. I squeeze her hand, once. “That was when his dad saved my life.”

“Mm” is all Ian says in response. He leans back and yawns so loudly some of the other mentors stare. He will be no use to Padgett if he does not rest.

“Get some sleep, Ian,” Dory Maud says, and her voice is so tired.

Ian considers us a moment and I think I see the exact moment he decides to trust us. He bows his head and rubs his temples and says, “You’ll wake me if anything happens?”

“Of course,” I say.

Dory Maud adds, “We’re allies, after all.”

Ian studies us both. “In more ways than one,” he says, and then he yawns again. He waves a lazy hand at us and disappears through the door leading to our temporary rooms.

Dory Maud and I sigh in unison and share a grim smile. “You should get some rest, Dory Maud,” I tell her, and pretend I don’t hear the echo of saying the same to Puck.

She hands me Puck’s screen and I comfort myself with the fact that both our tributes and Padgett are as safe as they can be. The boy from Eight’s cannon sounds in both screens, and I watch Puck snatch up a knife while Brian closes his eyes.

“Thirteen,” I say.

“They could do it, Sean,” she says. “They really could.”

Hope bumps against my breastbone and, for just this moment, I let it stay.

“They really could.”

____________________________________

 

**PUCK**

When I wake, Padgett hands me a handful of berries and the knowledge that the anthem hasn’t yet gone. Whoever died last night did so after the usual anthem would have played. We’ll see them tonight.

I mentally check the berries against the edible plants from the Training Center, and since I’m reasonably positive they’re safe, I tip the whole handful into my mouth. It’s so much easier to ignore hunger once you’ve fallen asleep.

Padgett’s eyebrows are more amused than I’ve ever seen them. I say, “What,” through my mouthful of berries, and the resulting jumbled word makes him snort a laugh.

Making him laugh makes me feel quite pleased with myself. I talk about a variety of things with my stuffed mouth in the hopes of hearing it again, and my rendition of the Treaty of Treason makes him double over and roll on the ground. I swallow the berries through my own laughter and pull him to his feet as best I can. He wipes his eyes, still grinning.

“My sister,” he says, when he’s able to breathe, “would always do that. She had the best voices.”

 _Had._ “She and I would get on,” I say lightly.

Padgett ducks his head as he props up my underarm with his shoulder. “Would have. She was reaped two years ago.”

I remember that year. That was the year one of the tributes went savage and tortured his victims for sport. It’s an odd thing to say in this arena designed for such things, but he went too far for the Capitol’s sensibilities. We all think that the mutts sent in that year were purposefully designed to hunt him.

The idea that this boy’s sister could have been one of his victims turns my stomach. I’m useless with these sorts of conversations. An odd, lightly heavy sort of silence stretches between us with only our shuffling footsteps to disrupt it.

“Tell me about Six,” I ask, and he tilts his head in a way that suggests curiosity. “I know nothing about it, other than it’s transportation.”

We climb and he tells me stories of the underground tunnels connecting supply lines and how they glow mineral green when a train approaches and how, in school, they learn to keep the lights running. They’re given a class task when they turn fourteen to be completed by their last year of school, everything from developing new helicarrier technology to new bicycles. People from Six are assigned to each of the districts for a short period of time after they turn eighteen, he tells me; it’s a way to maintain the supply lines and give them a chance to improve upon what’s already in place. Before the reaping he’d wanted to go to District Ten because of the animals and because his mom had been able to go, and he wanted to see how her fantastical stories of the place matched up. I tell him he still could. The look he gives me in return is so disbelieving that my heart stops for two seconds.

I offer little snatches of Four in return. When we stop for water, I tell him about Finn and Gabe and the time Gabe didn’t believe it was going to rain when Finn said it would, so he went out on the boat and nearly got skewered by a flash of lightning. I’m re-tying my hair up as I say this. He reaches out for Sean’s ribbon and tugs.

“Your token?” I hum. His eyes hook on my earring. “But I thought…”

I pause. I don’t want to lie to him. I say, “Can you keep a secret?”

“I swear on my life.”

Coming from anyone else I would swear they were joking, but his face is dead serious. “It’s a second token. It’s from our harvest festival.” I finish tying it to my hair. “It’s for luck.”

“Luck,” Padgett says. “Funny word to say in an arena.”

____________

 

Night comes. We shelter under a mess of bushes. Padgett points out the starless sky, and I hear Finn in his voice when he tells me a storm’s rolling in.

“How do you know,” I ask, “when a storm’s coming?”

“Part of our schooling. You’ve got to recognize the signs if you’re going to program a plane.” He pauses. “And my dad was assigned to Eleven, too. You learn quick there, he says.”

We watch as darkly shadowed clouds sail silently across the sky until the anthem shows us the boy from Eight. Padgett sniffles like he had last night, and it hits me all at once how afraid I would be without another person with me. There are thirteen of us left. Even excluding Brian, that’s still ten people between us ever having to fight each other. For the first time since stepping into the arena, I like my odds. I let myself relax for the first time since the reaping.

____________

 

The arena’s small, but somehow it’s still so vast.

We’ve finally climbed out of the treeline of this massive volcano and we can see everything from here. The sun shines pink atop the water, and it shimmers like the harbor back home.

This new perspective shows us other islands dotted around the main island. They’re not evenly spaced; they remind me of Finn’s cards spread across the table back when he didn’t know how to shuffle. I am about to tell Padgett he was right about the volcano being a good lookout when the water surrounding the island two away from us starts bubbling.

“What—” I start, but the bubbles collapse in on themselves.

It looks like — I’m not sure what it looks like.

It looks like the entire surf is throwing itself out of the sea only to be trampled downward and start the whole process over.

Padgett grabs my arm and says, “Look.” I follow his finger.

“Is that…”

A dark splotch looks like it’s clawing its way out of the surf. As we watch, several others swim up from the depths to join the first on the beach. It’s hard to be sure from this distance but I’d bet money those mutts are trotting on the sand. The way they move is vaguely similar to the way horses walk in our school videos.

The splotches gather and separate and gather again as if they’re all one animal before heading off into the shade of the palm trees. Padgett and I barely have time to open our mouths before a scream echoes around the arena. The cannon comes shortly after.

Padgett stares at me. I stare back.

“Let’s steer clear of that one, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says.

We turn to face the mountain and keep climbing.

____________________________________

 

**SEAN**

Those mutts are the same ones Malvern’s jockeys were riding that night I went to see him.

Neither Dory Maud, nor Ian, nor I know what to do with this information. I write it down and make sure to tell Tommy whenever he strolls in.

“They aren’t close,” Dory Maud says. Her fingernails dig into my palm. “Brian’s still making nets, right?”

I check the screen. “Right.”

“And Padgett and Puck won’t be going there anytime soon,” Ian adds. “They’re so close to the top, and they both heard. They’ll know not to go to that island.”

These statements settle around us like half-buried shells on the seafloor. I almost believe them.

I can’t ignore the fact that these bastardized horses are the same as the one on my pin.

____________________________________

 

**PUCK**

This far from the trees we’ve run out of birds to hunt. Padgett makes us both hungry by describing his birthday meal from last year, beef cooked and doused in orange sauce with sugared plums for dessert.

“I’d kill for some of that now,” he says, and when I tell him he’s in the right place he laughs.

It hurts how much he reminds me of Finn. He’s shorter than my brother is, and Finn’s hair looks the same color as dried seaweed when it’s been out in the sun too long, but they both laugh at the same sorts of things. Padgett points out today’s clouds in the way Finn does when he wants me to see how he fixed our rundown car and Finn complains about me leaning on him the same way Padgett’s grown to. He’s always quick to tell me he’s joking, though, whereas Finn lets us stew before relieving us.

No birds, but I find some little reptile creatures that seem meaty enough and not-poisonous enough for a quick meal. The benefit of being out of the treeline is the fact that rocks are now hot enough to fry the creatures without much fuss on our end of things. They’re surprisingly tasty.

I take a sip of water from the sleeve and it’s not reassuring how little is left. Some of it beads out of the fabric; Sean’s prediction for moisture evaporating quickly through the thin fabric is holding up well. We’ve taken four days so far to tackle this volcano. I don’t like our odds for getting down without one of us dehydrating.

We’re so close to the top now that I feel I should be able to reach out and grab it.

____________

 

Padgett helps me sit about twenty feet from the edge. In the dark of evening backlit as he is now, as he peers at the magma, he looks like part of the volcano itself. He seems to reach into the volcano like he’s expecting to grab something.

“Hey,” I call. He sits up immediately, as if caught reaching for Palsson’s cakes. For a wild second I expect to see frosting on his face. “You’re making me nervous.”

“Sorry.” He bundles his knees to his chest and from the way he watches the volcano I only half believe him.

I go through our inventory to keep from pulling him back. Padgett catches me doing this and teases until I throw a berry at his forehead.

My stitches are still bloody, but as near as I can tell there’s no sign of any infection. We’ll need some freshwater soon though so I can rinse it. I don’t trust the way the blood’s crusted, not as black edged as it is. I don’t think it was infected when Padgett sewed it up, but it very easily could have been since then. Neither of us has kept particularly clean.

Cautiously, I limp over to him. I’ve never seen a volcano before.

My first thought is that it’s a bit like the sea. Magma rises and falls as if borne on currents, the heat cast off reflecting off both our faces. It makes Padgett look like a painting I’ve seen in our Justice Building the day after our parents died. There was a dark-haired figure standing on one of the jagged harbor rocks looking out, out past the harbor, and the sea reflected dark on its face. Padgett looks like the inverse of that.

He pulls a face at me and I rumple his hair like I’d do to Finn, and we’re both so exhausted that we both go to sleep.

____________

 

Padgett’s cry wakes me.

I have a knife in my hand before I realize and it gleams in the light from the magma and the same light shines off the sword in Padgett’s chest.

The boy from Ten is dead before he knows it. He stares at the spear in his hand and crumples with the sound of his cannon and I’ve only just run over to Padgett when the boy from One stumbles over the ridge.

“Puck,” Padgett whispers, pointing.

I throw another knife. One dodges, then lunges for the two of us. I yank Padgett fifteen feet away and he cries out silently. I ignore him because I have to. One crouches into a defensive stance, hands out to the side, and it looks to me like he’s preparing to wrestle. I size him up quickly and confirm what I already know. He’ll kill me easily if I fight him hand to hand.

Then a spear wobbles through the air and catches him in the leg.

It’s all the distraction I need. I take the shaft of the spear and push it deeper into his leg, forcing him back to the edge of the volcano. I think I imagine the hiss when he hits the lava. His cannon sounds immediately.

The whole thing lasts maybe three minutes. I run back to Padgett and kneel, taking his hand.

“Your stitches,” Padgett says hoarsely. He touches them with shaking fingers.

“It’s alright,” I tell him. The smile I give him trembles. “They’ll heal.”

He looks at his fingertips and they’re red with my blood.

“There’s a med kit,” I start. He shakes his head emphatically. “No, listen. Dory Maud, or Sean — they can help, they can, they’ll send in something.”

I look up right after saying this, searching the skies. All I see are stars.

Padgett looks at me and I have the terrible sense that he’s looking beyond me. “This is it for me, I think,” he whispers. He presses his hand to just under the sword with a detached expression, as if it were happening to someone far away.

“It doesn’t have to be—”

He squeezes my hand. “Find Brian,” he tells me. It sounds as if he were speaking over miles of ocean. “Go to District Ten for me, yeah?”

“Yeah,” I say. Tears cloud my eyes and I furiously wipe them away. “I promise.”

Padgett closes his eyes.

____________

 

It’s a curse of the arena that he doesn’t die quickly. Twenty minutes after the wound his breathing falters then starts again, his chest rising and falling irregularly. He stopped speaking some ten minutes after our conversation.

I still hold his hand. Tears dry on my face only to be swept away by new ones.

There’s an overwhelming surge of hatred for the Capitol drowning any other emotion, save grief.

A pressure on my hand. Padgett stares at me and at once I’m scrambling to press sleeves to his chest, to stop the bleeding; I’d thought, earlier, that he was dead. Now I’m fighting not only his heart but him too. He is weak, but undeniably holding my hand away from his wound.

“Puck,” he says. My name is bloody and garbled in his mouth. He looks so, so tired. “Please.”

I don’t say anything. He presses a knife to my hands and says again, “Please.”

I take it. I press a kiss to his forehead.

His cannon sounds.

____________

 

For a long, long while I sit with him. Then I stand, search his things for any remaining food because the Gamemakers will lift it from the arena with him as soon as I leave. I take the boy from Ten’s pack as well.

Before I leave I go back to Padgett and he is so small.

I dab my fingers in his blood and draw a single, shaking line down his forehead the way Gabe did for our father and I did for our mother and the way they will do for me, too, if I am shipped home from this arena.

Then I say, as I did then, “The ocean keep our brave.”

I start to make my way down the volcano.

____________________________________

 

**SEAN**

Ian Privett doesn’t shake me off so I stay standing behind him, my hand on his shoulder. Dory Maud rubs her hands down his back the way she does for me. I do my best, in light of his grief, not to think how close we’ve come to the end. There are nine tributes left.

“‘The ocean keep our brave,’” Ian says finally. He glances at the two of us. “Is that a District Four saying?”

Dory Maud says, “For funerals. Remembrance. It’s a way of saying thank you, and of expressing love.”

“The ocean keep our brave.” His eyes are unreadable. “Good ring to it.”

____________

 

I run into Mutt Malvern in corridors leading to the main room.

“Saw what happened to your girl,” he says nonchalantly, leaning against the wall like he was waiting for me. “Poor thing. She must’ve really cared for that kid.”

“Don’t,” I say softly.

Mutt raises his eyebrows and smiles in a way that tells me he would have me thrown into the arena as easy as anything. It makes me long for a weapon. I do not trust him in these hallways away from other mentors.

“Must’ve cut her up. Bit like what happened to your mentor, huh,” he continues, still smiling. I am still frozen when he goes on. “What was it she promised your dad? That she’d look after you? Odd thing coming from someone who’s got a knife in your throat.”

I push past him but he calls after me. “Watch your back, Kendrick. My father isn’t the only one who knows about the bet.”

____________________________________

 

**PUCK**

I am lucky that the magma only starts when I’m more than halfway down the mountain. If I’d been at the top, I would’ve been unable to outrace it; as it is, my leg isn’t helping matters, but I can run a little now. If I’d had to come all the way down I would’ve vaporized sure as there are seashells at the bottom of the harbor.

The rest of the night and dawn pass in a bit of a haze. The anthem plays when I reach the treeline, but I already know who I’ll find if I look up. Padgett’s dying gasps aren’t ones I want to relive.

I spare myself a few seconds to rest and drink from a water bottle stolen from Ten’s backpack and as I slake my thirst, I think what would be different if we’d taken shifts. Maybe he’d still be with me, maybe not, but I can’t help thinking this is my fault. Maybe there was a med kit they would have sent; I know we have sponsors, but maybe I lost them by letting us lose Brian. The kit for my leg was the last thing sent in, and that happened so soon after we were separated.

The lava seems to flow faster now. I cap the water bottle and keep running down toward the water.

____________

 

Surely lava doesn’t usually flow this slow. I’ve taken several other short breaks to rest my leg, and I’m definitely going faster than the time if took to climb to the peak, but I expected to be dead already. I’m not sure that I’m not disappointed by this.

The only reason the lava would be slow is if it were trying to force me to run into another tribute. I tighten my grip on my knives and try not to trip. Dying from clumsiness would be a dumb way to go, though hopefully it would give Gabe and Finn something to laugh about at my funeral.

I’m still in the trees when I have another thought. Maybe the Gamemakers aren’t forcing me toward another tribute, but into a trap of their own design. This arena’s rigged with tricks. There’s probably a rock nearby that’ll explode into a fire mutt when the lava swallows it.

This thought has just left my mind when a rustle and scream come from my left and the girl from Nine tackles me.

She digs her fingers in my stitches and _pulls_ and I nearly blackout from the pain. Another rustle comes, this time from my right, and I duck, whimpering. My heart’s beating so fast. This could be it.

A dark shape sprints from the bushes and Nine flies off me. I think the shape throws her against a palm tree, but pain keeps me from being sure. My leg feels as if it were on fire.

 _Fire!_ I scramble to my feet, screaming again. The lava’s a stone’s throw away from us. I press my shaking hand to my cut and edge my way into the undergrowth.

A cannon splits the air. Behind me, someone shouts my name.

I stop immediately, my heart sprinting. “Brian?”

“Puck!”

We don’t have time for a reunion. Brian pulls me onto his back and I bury my mouth into his shoulder to keep from crying out every time he jostles my leg as he runs us both into the ocean.

Salt water licks my leg with rough tongues. Brian shoves the backpack strap between my teeth and I scream against it, but the only sounds around us are the hiss of lava flowing into the water and Brian’s breathing.

He’s swam us far enough away that the lava doesn’t reach us. The next island isn’t far, but we watch the trees go up in flames.

____________

 

We don’t speak much when we crawl ashore. Brian’s in charge of finding shelter, by silent agreement; I can’t stand without help now, and the cuts on his arms won’t stop him from protecting himself if need be. He leaves me on his back and I do my best to keep lookout. I think the only thing I’d intimidate is one of those bird creatures.

A rock formation like the one we found on our first island looms ahead of us. After a quick look around, Brian helps me off his back. By dumb luck I still have the med kit, so he cleans my leg as best he can from the dried salt and sews me back up. I watch his face instead of his hands.

“What happened?” he asks, after he ties part of his sleeve around the stitches. We’re out of bandages again.

There’s too much to say. I tell him this, and he laughs an empty laugh. This, combined with Padgett’s dried blood still under my fingernails, leaves me sobbing into his chest.

____________

 

The next morning I tell him all I can. About the axe, how Padgett wanted to climb the volcano, the mutts we saw off the coast. I tell him about cutting Padgett’s throat and he just sighs and kisses my temple and wipes my tears away.

“It’s going to haunt me,” I whisper, “for as long as my forever is.”

He holds me closer. “He wouldn’t want that for you,” he says.

I don’t want to tell him that that doesn’t much matter. I make him tell me where he’s been.

“Little bit of everywhere. I was looking for you both, but I was ambushed a few times. Made it out alright.”

The fact of him, here with me in this arena after I’ve killed our ally, sets me crying again. All I can imagine is slitting his throat too. Brian bumps my shoulder like he did at the reaping and I wipe my eyes. This isn’t the time to look too emotional. We’re at the final eight.

 _The final eight._ “Brian,” I say. He looks at me. “We’re in the final eight.”

The smile that crosses his face looks like it’s ready to die for me and I hate him a little for it. “Yeah,” he says, “I guess we are.”

____________________________________

 

**SEAN**

Tommy sweeps into our new private room after Brian and Puck trade watches. He takes me aside, telling me that my interview with Holly will take place as soon as Dory Maud comes back to relieve me. He hands me a cream to use on the circles under my eyes and I pretend as though I’ll use it and he pretends as though he believes me.

“Do you mind if I stay?” he asks, pointing to the chairs in front of Four’s screens. “The parties have spread to the streets.”

“Please,” I say.

We’re silent for a while, watching Brian check Puck’s leg for infection. He’s so careful with her. The idea of Mutt Malvern watching them now, bent over the panels in the Control Room, makes me uneasy to no end.

I need to tell Dory Maud what I’ve done. I should have told her after the conversation with Mutt, if not immediately after I made the bet. She would be furious with me. She deserves to be told.

Dory Maud joins us a little after Puck wakes up. We trade information with Tommy in secret sayings and hellos and I’m certain she can see the guilt sitting in my throat, but she doesn’t comment.

Tommy checks his watch and raises his eyebrows at me in question. I nod.

“We’ll be back in two hours,” he tells Dory Maud.

Dory Maud nods, her lips pulled tight in a tense line. “Good luck.”

____________

 

Tommy dresses me in a simple blue shirt and black pants and adds powdered pearls again to my eyes. He lets me arrange my hair, which is to say it doesn’t get styled at all.

I am not nervous for George Holly. He likes me well enough; he interviewed me after my Games, back when the full extent of my history with the Games was established. Now that it is I know he will lay some background with a few easy, but probing questions. This audience knows by now not to expect long answers.

Holly’s handshake is warm and firm as always. He leans forward to talk to me and I mirror him intentionally.

“So, Sean Kendrick,” he says, sounding for all the world like we had just passed each other in the market square and wanted a chat. “Tell us about this pin your tribute’s wearing.”

I pause a moment to gather my thoughts.

“It was my father’s. Brian didn’t have a token, so I offered it to him.”

“And it’s part of your district’s mythology?” I nod. Holly tilts his head to the side. “Could you elaborate on that for us?”

“How long do you have?” I ask, and he and the crowd laugh. I allow them a smile.

Holly spreads his hands grandly. “We have as much time as you need,” he says, still smiling. He lowers his voice conspiratorially and adds, “Though we have to have our next final eight interview in about twenty minutes, so not too much time.”

The audience laughs again.

I cross my legs and say, “It stems from the mutts surrounding our harbor. Some time ago there were actual water horses, and the Capitol took inspiration for our guardians from them. So the stories go.” I give another small smile. “A fiction, most likely. My father got the pin from his father, and his father before him, and so on.”

Holly considers me a moment. “It was in the Games before as well, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

He waits for me to go on but I stay silent. He says, gently, “Will you tell us about that?”

I have told this story enough times to be numb to the meaning. I take a drink of water as if to fortify myself.

“My father,” I say, “was reaped at eighteen. My mother was pregnant. She used to tell me that he’d hoped to win to support us.”

“But that didn’t happen,” Holly says softly, and despite how many times we’ve gone through this together, my words pile up in my throat.

Finally I say, “It didn’t. He was torn almost to pieces by mutts. My mentor promised to look after me. She brought the token back to my mother and pinned it to my blankets.”

Holly allows us a moment to drink more water as the crowd calls out in an echo of my pain. If I thought it ran deeper than the surface, I would be touched by this.

“I ask,” Holly says, shifting in his seat, “because this is what our favorite Puck did just the other night, is it not?”

“It is.”

“A curious thing. Your father’s pin back in the arena and Puck Connolly repeating Dory Maud in Padgett’s last moments.” I say nothing to this. Holly claps his hands as if to physically break the tension. “But enough of the heavy subjects. How are you finding the Games this year, Sean Kendrick?”

I am so relieved to talk about things other than my personal history that I spend five minutes analyzing the remaining tributes and my perception of their chances. Holly cuts in now and then with an anecdote of my Games and a parallel to Puck and Brian, I force laughter enough times to never laugh again in the next year, and he thanks me for my time.

“That’s all from us,” he says to the crowd. I catch some cheers of my name, so I wave and they grow louder. Holly joins them. “Let’s hear for Sean Kendrick, Thisby’s youngest!”

____________

 

Ian Privett is talking to Dory Maud in a quiet voice when I return. He breaks off abruptly, then shakes his head as if to settle himself.

“I’ll let him know,” Dory Maud says. “Annie and Tommy too.”

Ian shakes my hand and his face is the most serious I’ve ever seen it. “Thank you for your tributes,” he says. “I know how much Padgett meant to them. Let me know if anything comes up.”

We watch him leave.

“You told him?” I ask Dory Maud.

She tells me, hope and apprehension in her voice, “He already knew.”

____________________________________

 

**PUCK**

Two cannons split the air. Brian and I instinctively reach for each other, making the water splash to our shoulders. He raises his trident and turns so we’re back to back.

“See anything?”

Another cannon.

“Nothing,” I say.

There’s no sign of any water horse mutts, though that’s not reassuring; it’s highly likely the Gamemakers have other horrors lurking just out of sight, which is why we’re rehabilitating my leg in the relative shallows. There’s no smoke rising from the volcano island either, no tremors indicating another massive wave, and neither of us see another tribute. Brian slowly lowers his trident.

Brian takes a few steps forward and faces me, his hands out and ready to steady me should I need it. I stumble toward him and grab his arm.

“Alright, Katie-kat?” he asks with a smile that’s at odds with the way he’s still scanning for threats nearby.

I say, “Alright,” and stop him looking around by placing my hands on both sides of his face. He looks at me in surprise.

“What is it?”

I shrug. “Just happy you found me,” I tell him. I firmly shove down an image of his dying.

“Me too,” he says, and he kisses my forehead briefly. Then he pushes through the water toward the beach and waits for me to follow.

It’s a good idea of his, this. Back home, we often do strength training after leg injuries in the water; it’s low impact, and the resistance is still enough that it takes some effort to overcome. Here in the arena, with Brian waiting patiently in front of me, I’m reminded of Finn breaking his leg after falling off the roof. Gabe and I would swap afternoons taking him to natatorium a few minute’s walk from the market square. Fridays afterward, depending on how much spare cash we had from selling our catches, we’d go to Palsson’s, and it was as if the sugar and butter in the air rebuilt Finn’s muscles as much as the water did.

It strikes me suddenly that I’m content as I can be in my present situation. There are five of us left. The odds are high that Sean, Dory Maud, and I will be able to get Brian home safe.

I tell him this at evening as we risk a fire to cook some fish we spotted while exercising my leg. I leave out my plans to make sure it’s him with the crown at the end of this. I know him well enough to know that any mention of me dying for him would make him angry and possibly reckless and neither of us need that at this stage. Not when it’s so important.

“One of us could,” Brian says lightly. “What do you want to do about the rest?”

I take a moment to think while stretching out my leg. “Three died this morning on their own,” I say, and shrug. He meets my eyes. “We could leave them alone, let them kill each other. Odds are high that the Career pack is feeling the pressure. I’d be surprised if they lasted the rest of the day without another cannon. And I’m not much help in a fight right now and would probably get you killed, and I think we’d both rather that didn’t happen.”

“Yes, we both know how much I’d hate dying for you,” Brian says wryly. He takes the fish off the fire and uses one of my knives to cut it open.

“I couldn’t take that.” He looks at me now but I’m staring into the fire to avoid his eyes. “I’ve already — Padgett, and you’re my best friend.”

Brian stands and awkwardly holds the fish out in front of him as he comes around the fire to sit behind me. I lean back against his knees.

“Please,” I say. Tears threaten to cut me off so I pause long enough to swallow them away. “Don’t say things like that.”

He hands me half the fish. “I won’t,” he says. I feel him readjust my salt-caked ribbon. “I promise.”

We spend the rest of the evening in relative quiet aside from the crackle of the fire. It reminds me of the volcano though, so I look at the stars instead until Padgett’s storm blurs them out.

The anthem comes after our fire has burned itself into smoky orange embers. The faces of the girl from Five and the boys from Seven and Nine shine above us, distorted by the rain. Brian reaches down, and I let him lace our fingers together.

“It’s Two, us, and your friend from Seven,” Brian says, tapping the back of my hand with every word. “Doable.”

My response is cut off by a fanfare that spreads over the entire arena.

A female voice says, “Attention tributes. There’s been a rule change. The rule stating only one tribute may win has been revised such that two may be crowned, provided both represent that same district. This is effective immediately. Thank you.”

I all but tackle Brian to the ground and he’s laughing in such relief that I laugh too, and when he hugs me I hold on as if the earth is spinning. He cries into my hair. I hold on to keep from being flung loose.

____________________________________

**SEAN**

When they announce the rule change, Dory Maud lets out a string of rude words that I’ve never heard from her before.

“Don’t give me that face, Sean Kendrick,” she snaps. She goes back to studying her screen.

I know why she’s upset. This has never happened, not once in the history of the Games; I don’t think there’s a precedent for this. It reeks of Mutt Malvern. Both tributes from Two are still alive and lethal, not to mention Seven and her axes. It’s increasingly likely that Two will turn on Seven in the night and start hunting Puck and Brian, unless they mean to keep her around until the last moment. If I were Seven, I’d have left already.

I make a list of possibilities to give myself something other than worrying to do. I’m so close to being free of Malvern that I almost can’t take it.

“Oh,” Dory Maud says.

If I’ve never heard her swear, then I’ve hardly ever heard this tone from her. “What is it?”

In response she holds up her screen. Then it’s obvious, really, what it is.

I just say, “Ah,” and go back to my notebook in the hopes that this will keep her from asking questions about why my face is so warm. Puck and Brian hugging like the world just started is nothing to do with me. The fact that it makes my stomach twist in an odd way tells me only that I should never have made my bet.

They’re so close. There are only three tributes standing in their way, assuming the Gamemakers will keep their promise. Dory Maud mumbles curses under her breath in a way that tells me she doesn’t think they will either. I’d be lying to myself, though, if I claimed that I wasn’t hopeful.

This close to the end, neither of us is going back to our rooms. I get a plate of random foods from the center table and when I offer, Dory Maud takes a cup of coffee gratefully. She yawns and studies me for a quiet minute.

“When are you going to tell me what’s going on?” she asks, in a way that warns she will not accept any evasion on my part. I peel an orange methodically without speaking. She continues. “Don’t tell me there’s nothing. You’re much quieter than usual, and you’ve been jumpy since the night you came back from your assignation.”

I bow my head. “Dory Maud,” I start, but I can’t finish my sentence.

“I’ve known you,” Dory Maud says levelly, “these past nineteen years. I had thought you would have said something earlier, that’s what you usually do. Tell me. Please.”

“I haven’t been a good mentor,” I whisper. She says nothing, but her eyes narrow. “You’ll hate me, when I tell you.”

Dory Maud takes my hand. She says, “Tell me.”

I do. Her “Oh, Sean,” is so heavy that it nearly breaks my heart.

“They’ve only done this because of me. This is only to benefit Mutt Malvern. If Puck and Brian win, they’re going to revoke their ruling,” I say, my eyes shut. “Deciding who wins will shatter them.”

She doesn’t tell me I’m wrong. It's worse than anything else she could have done.

I've just doomed us all.

____________

 

The morning in the arena comes faster than here. Dory Maud and I frown at this.

“They’re moving up the timetable,” she says. “The finale must be coming soon.”

Onscreen, Puck and Brian are again in the surf working on her leg and I want to yell at them to get out of the water. The only possible reason the Gamemakers would have created this arena is if the finale were water related. I think of the water horses we’ve already seen. They move so quickly, they could easily be on Puck and Brian before they even realize.

There is nothing Dory Maud and I can do now. The hours trickle past. Brian and Puck are still in the water, now taking turns watching the island and the sea while the other floats. Dory Maud’s grip on my hand is so tight it hurts.

After three and a half hours I blink and Puck and Brian are nowhere to be seen.

____________________________________

 

**PUCK**

I open my mouth to yell for Brian and choke on seawater as bubbles rise all around me. The current flips me around and I break the surface, gasping for air, and then immediately am pulled to the sandy bottom.

I can’t see. The undertow scrapes me along the sand and it clouds the water in front of me.

I need — air—

I stop struggling.

____________

 

The undertow washes me up on the beach of the main island. I lie in the sand until my head stops spinning, then, unsteady, I get to my feet.

I can’t see Brian anywhere. If this is the end, he has to be here somewhere; the only way this fight is to be as dramatic as the Games demand is if we’re all in the same area. He must be here. I call for him as softly as I can.

Then — there! A dark blob floats a little ways away. It has Brian’s hair.

I’m splashing and then swimming toward him as fast as I can and the waves I make break against him, but he isn’t moving. Panic has my heart in a stranglehold. He can’t be—

I twist around on my back and reach across his chest, pulling him onto me as much as I can while keeping both our heads out of the water. We’re back on the shore in what feels like half a second.

I tilt his head back and breathe twice into his mouth and nose and start compressions. I time them with the only thought in my head: _Brian will not die today._

After an age, he lurches awake and stops my movement. I don’t cry, but it’s a near thing. I push his curls off his face. He smiles, but it’s edged with pain.

I help him sit up and am about to offer water when I realize the undertow swept our packs away. He shakes his head as if to say it doesn’t matter, but it does. By barest luck I still have four knives in my kit, but otherwise we are, finally, well and truly on our own.

“Are you okay?”

Brian nods, coughing up what looks like bile. “I think I’ll be the one holding us back, in this fight,” he says.

I shake my head. When I speak it’s for both our benefit. “We can do this. Only three of them, and then we’re going home.”

A cannon punctuates my words and we’re both on our feet before the sound fades away. I don’t have time to hope it was Seven before the water starts boiling halfway between this island and the next. The hairs on my arms prick. The first dark shape breaches the surface of the water.

It’s heading toward us.

“Run!”

I push Brian ahead of me toward the treeline. We’re both unsteady, but if we have enough of a head start—

An axe whips into a tree by my head.

The girl from Seven yells, “There, Esther!”

 _No._ I keep pushing at Brian until he starts running faster. The handle of my knife squeaks in my grip, but I don’t relax my hand as bushes fly past us.

We have to get to the Cornucopia. If we have high ground, then we stand a chance. I don’t let myself think about how we’re both to get up it just yet.

Another axe flies ahead of us. This time I turn and throw a knife back and it catches Seven in the upper arm. She ignores it, snarling. They’re both gaining on us.

Then someone shrieks. I turn.

One of the horse mutts has Seven’s arm in its crushingly flat teeth. It yanks, and her arm comes clean off. She reaches for her last axe but Esther rips it from her grip and runs toward me and Brian. The last I see of Seven before the mutts engulf her are her fingers still stretched out. Her cannon comes seconds later.

I turn and sprint as fast as I’m able. Ahead of me, Brian’s reached the sands surrounding the Cornucopia; I see him hesitate and look back for me, but I yell for him to keep going. One of us should survive this.

Esther doesn’t try to hurt me as she runs past. Brian’s still coming back, ignoring the obscenities I’m throwing at him. I’m oddly pleased by the fact that the Capitol will have to censor my words when they compile Brian’s replay.

The mutts have stopped nosing at what remains of Seven’s body. One of them, a black and white terror, makes direct eye contact with me.

“You have to keep going!” I shout at Brian. He shakes his head and then suddenly he’s right beside me. “I’m going to slow you down! Go!”

“I’m not leaving you here,” he yells. “Both of us or neither, I swore I’d protect you.”

“I did the same, get out of here!”

“No.” He scoops me up, ignoring my fists against his chest.

We make it three steps before the mutts surround us.

____________

 

Back home, there’s a lighthouse overlooking the harbor. Its light only goes on at the end of fishing hours, except for night fishing; for the longest time when I saw it I would run to the lane leading to our house, stubborn enough to want to be the first one to hug our parents when they returned. When they died, I climbed the lighthouse alone. From the bottom looking up it looked as though the steps went on forever until they pierced the sky.

For a long while after that I thought of death the same way. Now, facing it, I want to go back to when dying was a quiet, grey, lonesome thing. The mutts are much too loud for me to come to any sort of peace with myself.

It strikes me after a moment that the mutts are waiting for something. They paw at the ground and seem to shake their seaweed-stained manes impatiently. Waiting for them to move is almost worse than being bitten straight off.

“Why haven’t they attacked yet?” I whisper into Brian’s bodysuit.

He turns us slowly, slowly, until we see that we’re encircled by them. I slowly take out two of my three knives and hand one to him.

“Set me down,” I say quietly, and he does. Immediately all the mutts’ attention is on me. I shudder under their eyes. Then I think how Gabe and Finn must be feeling back at home, and I sink into a defensive stance. Brian imitates me.

Then a breeze stirs my hair and Sean’s ribbon flutters across my face.

The mutts’ reaction is immediate; they whinny and shy away a few steps. I immediately rip the ribbon from my hair and snap it at the ones nearest me. They sniff it once and step back again. I follow, pressing forward with the ribbon outstretched until they turn and gallop toward the Cornucopia. The ones on the other half of the circle scream and follow.

Brian and I unfreeze as soon as the last one disappears from sight. This time, when he tries to pick me up, I get on his back without arguing.

We’ve just reached the beach when the cannon sounds.

We won.

_We won._

I slide off Brian’s back, shuddering. He smooths my hair back from my face and I pull him close to me. His heartbeat against mine is the sweetest thing I’ve ever known. I press my forehead to his and we cry together. We watch the helicarrier come for Esther’s body.

When it leaves, the trumpets signaling the end of the Games still haven’t gone.

“What’s happening?” Brian asks. He watches the sky as if an answer will come from there.

I say, “Maybe they’re having technical difficulties.” The weight settling in my stomach tells me it isn’t technical difficulties.

“Brian,” I start, but a voice cuts me off.

“Attention. According to a further review, the announcement stating two tributes could win has been found to go against the Hunger Games’ set of rules. There will only be one victor. I repeat, there will only be one victor. Thank you.”

This sinks in only slightly faster for me than it does for Brian. His eyes widen.

I say, “No,” as if doing so will stop any of this. Brian places his hands alongside my face to stop me from shaking my head. “I won’t do this.”

This must be the most twisted finale in the history of the Games.

“How dare they do this to us,” I whisper. Brian jerks his head toward the trees and I frown until he gives me a significant look and does it again.

I cover his hands with mine. “How dare they,” I say, loud enough that the cameras will easily pick it up. “What president goes back so easily on his word? Where does it end, if he does this to us who are powerless to rebel?” Brian nods slowly, encouraging me to keep going. “What happens when he does this to the districts?”

A triumphant fanfare cuts off the middle of my final sentence. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the voice says hastily. “The victors of the Seventy-fourth Hunger Games, Brian Carroll and Kate Connolly! The tributes of District Four!”

____________________________________

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This section was unbetaed and mildly rushed; if there are typos, please bear with me, I'll find them on my reread and be highly embarrassed by them.  
> I may add more, depending on what my amazing beta thinks; if so, I'll add something here and at the end of next chapter saying so. Next chapter won't be as long, so with any luck I'll be able to procrastinate the rest of my homework whilst writing it.


	3. Part Three: The Victors

________________________

 

**THE VICTORS**

________________________

 

**PUCK**

The sea murmurs to me in my dreams. She rocks me softly, trying to lull me back to sleep, but her arms are too tight and I gasp to keep from being pulled under.

The last few moments from the arena swim up hazy before my eyes. I open them.

I force my heart rate to settle while I scan the room I’m in. There are several medical-looking TV screens bordering my bed and an IV drip trailing from my left arm. The lighting is low, making the walls look grey like the rock face from our first night in the arena. I’m itching for a knife before I realize two things. One, that I’m out of the arena, and so don’t need a knife on me at all times. Two, that my right arm is handcuffed to the bedframe, and so have never been so in need of one as now.

I’m surprised the Gamemakers didn’t just kill me.

____________

 

Someone must remove the handcuff while I sleep because I wake to someone holding my hand.

“Hey,” whoever it is says. I roll my head toward them, then sit straight up.

“Dory Maud.” My eyes flit from her to Sean and back again. “Sean. What — what’s going on?”

Dory Maud sighs and taps the back of my hand in a way I think she means to be reassuring but really just reminds me that I’ve been unconscious for some time. “We’re in the Training Center again. Med wing. Brian’s fine.”

I think they both notice how this doesn’t set me at ease, because Sean leans forward. He says, “Malvern’s not happy,” and now Dory Maud laughs. It’s a strained one.

“‘Not happy,’ he says. ‘Pretty pissed,’ more like,” she says. She raises her eyebrows. “I’m sure we don’t have to tell you why?”

“No,” I whisper. I focus on Dory Maud holding my hand to keep from screaming.

_ They should have killed me. _

I say, “What do I do now?”

Sean checks the nearest monitor. He says, “You’ve been out two days. You had surgery on your leg, and you should be healed now. The final interview with Holly is in two days.”

I nearly throw up at that. The final interview forces the victor to relive every moment of the Games, to re-see every brutal death. I am lucky because I’ll be able to sit with Brian, and yet. I don’t really need an interview to remind me of the other tributes. I killed enough of them myself. 

“No,” I say. I stare at them both until they look at me. “Not what’s happening in the next few days. How do I get us out of this?”

Dory Maud sucks in her bottom lip and Sean frowns and it hits me all at once. When I was younger, Finn and I would sometimes have competitions to see who could hold their breath the longest, diving down to the bottom of the harbor until our lungs cried with the pain of it all and our feet brushed seaweed. This is what it feels like, this realization that they don’t know. There was never a moment when they thought we both would live. They don’t know what to do with us, with me, now that we have.

“This isn’t something you get out of,” Dory Maud says. “You have some leeway for the Victory Tour, but after that….You made a lot of important people very, very nervous and angry, Puck.”

I search their eyes desperately, asking, “Is there nothing I can do?”

Sean says, “Survive,” and this is when I start to cry.

____________

 

They release Brian and I a few hours after our mentors came to see us, and the elevator comes too quickly now. There are twenty-two other people who will never wait for this elevator again.

Our rooms are just as we left them, but they are foreign to me. Brian takes my hand and I can tell by the set of his shoulders that he feels the same way. I half expect the girl from Five to jump around the corner, an axe in her hands, and it is only Brian’s whisper in my ear that we are safe, we are out of the arena, that calms me. I am holding him so tight his fingers go red but he doesn’t say anything. 

Elizabeth pops up from the couch in the living room and Brian shouts. I put my arms around him, shielding him from Elizabeth’s raised eyebrows and sharp expression. Her wig is a shimmering pearl color. I shield him from this too.

He is trembling. Sean and Dory Maud and Elizabeth say nothing as I walk us down the hallway leading to our rooms. I bundle him into my shower, ignoring the bathtub for the time being; I have had enough of swimming for a lifetime. He comes back to himself when I turn on the shower and doesn’t complain that I’m getting his clothes all wet.

Brian opens his arms and says, “Please,” and his voice trembles. I step into the shower and his arms and we stand like that until the water runs cold.

____________

 

Brian is still asleep in my bed when I wake. The clock on the wall tells me it’s outrageously early in the morning. I don’t realize what’s woken me until I realize we’re both shivering. The blankets pooled off the bed at some point in the night — we, accustomed to sleep in the arena, must not have noticed. The coldness in my feet tell me the blankets have been on the floor for ages.

I settle them back around his shoulders, but even as I do, I know I will not be able to go back to sleep. I kiss his hairline and pull on that giant sweater from the train a lifetime ago and go into the hallway.

My hands tighten instinctively, aching for a knife. None of these shadows are familiar to me.

Something falls and I jump before Sean says, “Sorry.”

It takes two seconds to find him. He’s sitting on the couch in the living room again, and for a moment I’m taken back to before the arena and how I’d thought he was sharp enough to cut yourself on. Now he looks eroded. I want to pinch him back to the way he looked before.

His journal is on the floor. I pick it up as I sit down next to him, and Sean takes it wordlessly. I wrap my fingers around my legs.

“Did you know?” I ask. He tilts his head to the side, and this is so familiar I nearly cry again. He is about to say  _ know what _ so I clear my throat. “The ribbon. Did you know?”

“I didn’t know it would make them back off like that,” he says, turning his journal over in his hands. I am again struck by the familiarity of him, the comfort in the fact that he’s next to me, breathing, and he was not in my arena. It lets me distance myself somewhat. Even if just in my mind.

“But you knew it would do something.”

Sean doesn’t try to deny this. He bows his head.

I whisper, “Why are you out here? It’s late.”

“It is.” He looks at me now, and his expression is so steady. “I didn’t want you to be alone, if you came out here in the middle of the night. Or middle of almost morning, as it happens.”

I manage a smile. It hurts. “Middle of almost morning? Is that the proper term, then?”

“Proper as anything,” he says, and when I lean against him, he puts an arm around my shoulder and laces his fingers with mine.

Somewhere during the almost morning we lie down and I am on his chest, his hands on my back and in my hair. The last thing he whispers is, “Goodnight, Puck Connolly,” and then I fall asleep.

____________________________________

 

**SEAN**

She sleep for a few hours before calling out and waking herself up. I hold her while she cries, whispering nonsensical things into her ear. I think I am telling her about the time I broke my ribs when I was ten patching a roof for Mooneyham when she calms. I can’t help wondering whether she will be strong enough for what lies ahead. I hope she will be. This is not the time to falter.

In this dim light, Puck looks hollow. I wish I could shoulder this for her.

“You should go to bed, Puck,” I say softly. The way I’m holding her means I say this into her hair.

Her voice, when it comes, is made quiet by my shirt. “I don’t want to see them in my dreams.”

“It gets easier,” I say, because I have to. It is true and untrue at the same time. I still see Mary when I close my eyes, but she no longer calls out for me to save her and I no longer have to face the fact that I could not. Now when she appears she just watches me try and fail to scream. I’m not sure which is worse.

Puck doesn’t say anything to that. The minutes slip by, and pink has crawled into the sky by the time she whispers goodnight and goes back to her bed and Brian.

____________

 

Dory Maud finds me around noon when she wakes up. Her hair is tangled in a cloud all around her face, and she holds up a warning hand before I can say anything.

“Don’t, Sean Kendrick,” she says, while pouring herself a glass of wine. “I’m well aware I look like death unfrozen and then drowned.”

“I wasn’t going to say that.”

She makes her way to the couch and flops down. I am, as always, surprised that she spills nothing. “Good. Elizabeth already beat you to it, it would’ve been very unoriginal.”

“We can’t have that,” I say, and Dory Maud smiles reluctantly. 

“I talked with Tommy and Annie,” she says, and takes a sip. “They agree with us that the larger plan needs to be moved up.”

“And Holly?”

She sighs. “Still in the works.”

I say, “He does like us, though,” and she shrugs.

“That could mean anything and nothing,” she replies, like I knew she would. “Liking us does not mean he would join—”

“Our picnic? That’s quite a shame,” I say, a little quicker than I would have normally. My heart is going so fast. I don’t want to think about how many cameras may have captured what we aren’t saying.

Dory Maud’s eyes are wide but she follows my lead. My pulse has settled by the time Elizabeth joins us a few hours later, and we talk about nothing for the remainder of the afternoon.

____________

 

When he sees me Tommy says, “I’m sorry,” and drops his things on the floor to hug me. I pick them up and wordlessly lead him back to my bathroom. There is no need for words. There are only so many reasons he would come to me looking as sad as he does, and all of them have to do with Malvern.

“He isn’t keeping his end of the bargain,” I say. My voice is as numb as I feel. Tommy doesn’t even pretend to look confused, and I know I’m correct. Malvern has probably told as many people as he wants by now, just enough to spread a warning along; I am a good example for his enemies, and he knows what cards to play in order to make me helpless. Two of them were just pulled from the arena.

It is a fair trade off. Break this deal with me, go back on his word in private and gain leverage, in order to keep the promise with Brian and Puck. He knows me well enough now to know that I’ll do what I must to keep them safe from him.

I don’t let myself consider how long this safety will last.

____________

 

I leave our quarters dressed much as I was my last assignation, in my district colors and with pearls around my eyes. I have had enough of pearls by now. When I ask, Brian gives me my father’s pin, and I attach it to my shirt while Puck watches open-mouthed from the kitchen table. I look at her long enough to know that continuing to look at her will hurt too much, so I stop.

Before I leave Dory Maud kisses my forehead. I hug her, tight.

“It’s going to be fine,” I whisper. “I’ll keep them safe.”

She says, “I know you will,” and then I’m gone.

____________________________________

 

**PUCK**

Sean is gone the evening and the night and morning too, and when he reappears, he has enough marks trailing down his neck to underneath his collar and they confirm what I’d feared. He doesn’t say anything though, just sits with us at lunch and joins in now and then when Dory Maud and Elizabeth leave gaps in the conversation. They’re talking about the interview and I know I should be paying attention, but Dory Maud looks more concerned about Sean’s appearance than she had been before, and something is different this time.

Brian takes my hand and this makes me pay attention to the conversation.

“If they ask,” Dory Maud’s saying, “tell them something simple. You weren’t deliberately inciting rebellion, you wanted to say whatever you could to get you both out.” 

Even the thought of the word is thrilling. Rebellion.

Sean looks at me like he knows what I’m thinking. “Puck, do you understand?”

Brian whispers, “Has there been rebellion?”

“Puck,” Dory Maud repeats, “do you understand what we need you to do?”

“I want to know, too,” I say, and Brian squeezes my hand tight. 

Our mentors and Elizabeth have a conversation without words. Part of me is surprised Elizabeth is involved; this didn’t strike me as something she would have a role in. Maybe they’re trying to decide how much to tell us in order to get us to behave in public.

Sean says, “There’s been no rebellion.” He looks right at me as he says it.

____________

 

Tommy sweeps me and Brian both into a hug and it’s an uncomfortable one because my ear is crushed to Brian’s shoulder thanks to how tight Tommy’s holding us, but it’s an emotional one too, because neither Brian nor I thought we’d see him again when we into the arena.

Our prep teams usher us into our respective bathrooms like they had for our last interview, except this time I look at them. I hadn’t let myself see them before, not after the lead woman had said my tears would ruin her hard work. Her hair is the same shade of white that Elizabeth’s is. One of the men’s hair is the same.

I have a sudden, horrible thought that they’re trying to imitate our outfits, trying to get a hold of us by copying the things Tommy put us in. One of them wears a pearl earring in the same ear I wore my token.

The idea of the Capitol as a whole looking us and deciding which pieces they want to take threatens to make me throw up. I stop looking at them, instead staring without seeing in the mirror as they wrestle my hair and dab things on my face. They give me a necklace with a single pearl. It takes everything I have to stop myself from screaming at them and flinging it across the room.

Tommy shoos them out after inspecting their work. He whistles as he brushes something red over my cheeks, making me look like I’m blushing just slightly, and then he rubs off the lipstick they’d given me and paints on something considerably more pink.

“We’re going with the innocent look then?” I say, after he steps back to study me. He raises his eyebrows in a swift, wry movement, but he doesn’t reply. His non-answer is as good as one. Something in my stomach flutters.

Tommy says, “I thought you’d like to look more like yourself, after the arena,” and I want to tell him I died in there when I killed Padgett.

What I say instead is, “I would.” He smiles at me. For the first time, his smile for me looks strained and worried and the fact that it’s my fault makes me ache. 

He unzips a bag hidden in the closet, and I see a flash of something blue. I spare a moment to hope that this blue doesn’t come to represent the Games for me in the same way pearls do, not this blue that looks like the sky does if you look up at it through water. I don’t know what I would do if that became the case. 

Tommy helps me into it and I gasp. Somehow, he’s made the material float gently like seafoam does on the beach back home. It’s so soft and beautiful under my hands and on my skin that I hope, maybe, it will help me look as innocent as I need to be.

I go into my room and take Sean’s ribbon from my bedside table. Tommy takes it when I offer, gently tying my hair up in a bow. He frees some strands to frame my face and curls my hair one last time, and then kisses my forehead the way he had before our first round of interviews.

“You look lovely,” Tommy says. 

“All your doing,” I tell him, trying for a smile, and then I kiss him on the cheek. I try to put every apology and thanks that I can in those half seconds. The way he nods and smiles back tells me he understands.

____________

 

George Holly introduces us and we have an applause that lasts longer than five minutes. I know, because I’m watching the countdown clock tick the time away. I dearly want not to be here.

Beside me, Brian waves at the crowd and lifts our joined hands into the air. The newly strengthened clapping goes on for a further three minutes, and Holly has to stand back up and make gestures for them to quiet. 

We exchange some pleasantries and accept his congratulations, and then our attention is directed toward a giant television dominating the space behind us.

I’ve been dreading this. There’s a lot of material because they have to show clips from the opening parade and everyone’s interviews, though of course they center on us both. There’s a lot of time given to our injuries from the initial bloodbath, as well as our fights; the clip of me and Padgett atop the volcano goes on for so long I have already started staring at my hands by the time they show me killing him. Beside me, Brian wraps his arm around my shoulder, and I let him. 

The show the entirety of the final showdown with the horse mutts. This close, I can see blood dried around the mutts’ mouths. They have square pupils. I don’t have to imagine how horrible it would be to see them in my last moments.

The crowd gasps when my ribbon drives the mutts back, and then the screen cuts to Brian and I sobbing against each other and the announcer proclaiming us victors.

This isn’t correct. I look at Brian and he shakes his head, just once, and Holly bites his lips before grinning for the audience.

“And just like that, the Seventy-Fourth Hunger Games has concluded,” he says, and the audience cheers again. He leans forward toward Brian and me and asks, “How does it feel to be victors?”

Brian and I look at each other. I plaster on a smile and say, “I won’t lie to you, George, I’m so happy to be sitting here with you both.”

“I’m trying to imagine how it’s going to feel,” Brian says, his voice soft, “to go back and see Jonathan.”

Immediately my response is ignored in light of this. I don’t mind; Holly asks Brian questions about his family, trying to find out what exactly he’ll be going home to. I add details and comments now and then about how Brian’s trying to develop a new knot for nets and I think, one eye on the countdown, that maybe we can keep talking about these things. About what kind of pastry we’ll both try from Palsson’s, how nice it’ll be to sleep in our beds, the first sunset we’re going to see. 

This last is the first thing I’m excited for. The sunset over the harbor is always beautiful. We don’t often get to see it unless we’re night fishing because of the curfew, but Victors’ Village is on an outcrop rising above the market square, and I’ve heard from Peg Gratton that the sunsets are beautiful from the living room. Large windows and a balcony, she says.

Holly walks us through the mutt attack again, and he asks me, “What’s so special about this ribbon, Puck?”

I touch it self-consciously. I have no idea what to say. “It’s my token.”

“It must really be something, if it can stop a horde of mutts,” he says, clearly asking me to say something more.”

“It’s from my mentor,” I tell him, and he nods to encourage me. “There’s a festival back home, and it takes over the entire market square in every way possible. It’s tied to the mythology of our district. Every year, in thanks to the sea, we have as massive a celebration as we can. This ribbon is dropped somewhere in the square with a shell along with hundreds of blue ones. Whoever finds this one gets a wish from the sea.”

Holly says, “That’s some ribbon. And you said it was a present from your mentor?”

“Yes,” I say. I find Sean in the front row and I look at him as I say, “He said it was for luck.”

“Luck,” Holly repeats. “Well, it’s clear enough that luck was in your favor, isn’t it?” The crowd cheers again, and Brian bumps into my shoulder as though embarrassed. The look he gives me is a question I don’t have an answer to.

_ Was it luck? _ I ask myself this as we stand and have to smile to hundreds and thousands of people who know nothing about us except Brian can use a trident and I can throw a knife. Was it luck? Will our luck hold?

Brian pulls me to his side, trying, I think, to be steady for me. All I can feel is that he doesn’t know either.

____________________________________

 

**SEAN**

Alone, I watch the Capitol fade in the distance until it’s swept up by the mountains. It reminds me of the way things disappear so completely in water.

The train’s making good time. At this rate, we should be back in Four by early evening. There will be parties in the upcoming days, but the night we return is understood as being family only. It’s difficult acclimatizing after the arena, but family usually helps. So I’ve heard.

“Sean?” 

I startle. I hadn’t noticed Puck coming into the room. “Puck?”

She’s back in her giant sweater. I hope she knows she can take it with her; she looks too soft to be allowed, and there’s a large part of me that wants to see her like this again. I don’t know if this is a thing I’m allowed to want.

Puck comes to stand by me at the window and with her comes the smell of both citrus and pine. I take a deep breath in as she says, “Brian wants to be alone tonight. Says his nightmares are too bad, doesn’t want to keep me up.”

I say, “He’s trying to help you.”

“I know.” Puck closes her eyes. “I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

My heart stutters, then all at once pounds so hard I worry wildly that it’ll bruise. 

“Do you…” I trail off. I don’t know how to ask her this.

She looks at me and the uncertainty in her eyes almost hurts. “You don’t have to.”

This is the opposite of what I want, and I tell her. Puck blushes the same color as her hair. She nods once, biting her lip, and I follow her to her room.

____________

 

We have done this before, but somehow sleeping with her in a bed is very different.

There’s more room to spread out, for one. I hold her to me now, my chest and stomach flush to her back, and I don’t worry about either of us falling off the edge of the bed the way I had on the couch. I wonder briefly why we hadn’t done this before when I remember Dory Maud’s worry that doing so would make the arena, somehow, worse. There is none of that to worry about now.

If I turn my head right now, my lips would brush her neck.

I nearly do. I don’t know if this is a thing I’m allowed to want, either, but I want it.

____________________________________

**PUCK**

Gabe and Finn look so odd standing outside this massive house but it doesn’t matter, because this house is ours for as long as the Capitol keeps me alive. My brothers seem to think the same, especially after the interview with Holly cut out my speech; Gabe’s cried no less than four times, and Finn hasn’t stopped making hot chocolate since I came into the house. Our living here feels very conditional. I don’t want to think about how long we have to keep this house. 

“We were so worried you wouldn’t come back,” Gabe says, his voice low. His eyes are red as the cherries Finn found somewhere. I eat one now as we wander around these massive rooms. I can’t see what exactly we’re meant to do with it.

I say, “I didn’t either,” and because I don’t trust that there aren’t any microphones hidden in the ceilings, I change the subject. He follows my lead and we talk about the things that happened while I was gone, and in the kitchen I still hear Finn at the stove. 

This familiarity and difference at once make me hate the Capitol more. My brother wipes his face and there are lines on his face that shouldn’t be there and if I hadn’t been picked, we’d be talking about the harvest and payments on the house. We would talk about how to buy Finn new clothes so he wouldn’t have to keep wearing our father’s old shirts. We wouldn’t be talking around what I’ve done and who I’ve killed to get back to them, because I would not have left.

____________

 

Finn hugs me tight before going to bed. I hug him back and let myself cry for the first time since coming home. Gabe wraps us both up and when he cries, I feel his tear land in my hair. 

“Goodnight,” Finn says finally, but he holds us tighter.

I have to pat their backs in order to be released. From their faces, they did not want to let go either. Gabe leaves me with a reminder to sleep and he reminds me so much of our mum that I laugh. His relief at my laughter makes something in my chest crack.

They go up the stairs to their rooms and I am alone.

I go to the living room to test Peg’s comment on the sunsets, but before I make it, there’s a knock at the door. I sneak quickly into the kitchen to grab a knife before taking a deep breath and yanking the door open and then I’m confused. I can think of no reason Sean Kendrick would be on my doorstep.

Sean’s eyes widen at the knife. He opens his hands as if to tell me he’s unarmed, and I step back to let him in and close the door behind him. I’m all at once very happy that Gabe and Finn have gone to bed. Seeing Sean reminds me of having him in my bed and his lips so close to my shoulder I could almost feel them.

I don’t know how I can be feeling these things after the arena but I need him not to mention them. Except when he doesn’t, a small part of me I don’t want to think about is disappointed. I shove this down as best I can.

“I’m sorry to do this,” he says. He isn’t looking at me, and this worries me. “I have to talk to you.”

“What is it?” I ask. 

I’m imagining revolts across Thisby. A whole mob of citizens throwing down their work and picking up guns and weapons and storming the Capitol. Something I would be responsible for, something for which Malvern would kill me. I’m so certain this is what he needs to tell me that when he does tell me I have to ask him to repeat it, because it’s so different than what I expected.

Sean says, “I made a bet on you and Brian.” Now he looks at me, but he looks like he’s expecting me to come at him with the knife. “I may have endangered you in the arena because of it. It was unforgivable of me to wager on your lives, and I understand if you—”

“If I hate you?” He nods. I pause a moment, keeping his gaze, and I don’t think I do. I have to bite down on anger but I don’t hate him. “I don’t.”

“That’s more than I deserve.”

“Probably,” I say, and Sean looks up like I hit him. He starts to say something but I hold up my hand to stop him. “Is there anything else?”

I can see in his eyes that there is. I know him this well by now.

He says, “No.”

I nod. I feel, stupidly, like I’m about to cry. “Okay, then.”

He looks at me and I don’t know what I’m feeling. I’m afraid he’s about to say something to make me want him to stay with me. I can’t tell if, in light of this, I want him to try.

Sean seems to be waiting for me to say more, but I don’t. He seems to take this as his cue to leave. 

He’s out the door before I think to ask him.

“Sean,” I call. He turns immediately. “Was it worth it? What you wagered on.”

I don’t know why I want to know this. There is no version of this answer that doesn’t hurt me.

“No,” Sean says softly. “It wasn’t worth anything.”

Tears prick my eyes. I shut the door as softly as I can.

The sun has already set when I get to the living room. I sink into an armchair, his ribbon in my hands, and I sit there until morning.

____________________________________

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> END OF FIC ONE  
> ________________
> 
> That's one done! Geez that took ages  
> I have Ideas for a second fic; I have no promises on when that'll happen, but it'll happen at some point  
> And don't worry :) Sean/Puck will happen for realsies in the upcoming fic (or fics? Haven't decided yet). The way the ending worked out made me feel it would be unrealistic for Puck to be alright with everything, so the slow burn is living up to its name
> 
> Thank you for reading this! I'm on tumblr: [Come say hi :)](http://ivecarvedawoodenheart.tumblr.com)


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